Why Windows Vista is so delayed

Hello guys, sorry for not updating for so long. Have been busy with assignments for the past few weeks.

I came across this article by Joel a few days before. It is an article which criticizes on the unnecessarily bloated shutdown menu in the oncoming Windows Vista.

Then today morning, I found another article, in reply to the above, written by a former developer in Microsoft. What amazed me was not that it takes so many people to implement such a trivial feature, but the fact that:

So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes.

It is so wrong from the software engineering point of view. The bazaar style of the open source development might be more manageable compared to this. At least you see changes commited by others right after they have done it. Heard that the windows kernel is a microkernel and they should be able to divide the tree of repositories into independent ones. But, well, integration is always the strong point of Microsoft :P