As Longhorn looms, we examine Microsoft's track record in hitting product ship dates and offer advice for coping with the inevitable.
A slip in the ship date for Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 rendered Chris Ferrari unable to hold up his end of a company-wide upgrade of some 55,000 desktops. A delay in the rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) put Laura Hunter a year behind in rolling out SP2 to students at the University of Pennsylvania. And a change in the ship date for Microsoft CRM means Wesley Bielinski's Exchange environment doesn't have the redundancy he prefers.
Three dedicated Microsoft customers with three stories following a similar theme: They got burned by Microsoft missing an announced product ship date.
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