Bill Gates on how fast Operating System versions should come out…

CNET News.com interviewed Bill Gates, after we heard that Windows Vista has been delayed again and will only be available to the public in 2007. Here’s a brief extract:

Should there be a new version of Windows every 18 months?

Gates: (Features) like the browser user interface, the media capability, some of those things you can have updates more often than even every 18 months and users who want that can download those things because they don’t affect compatibility. Whereas the file system or the scheduler, the rights protection pieces, the device driver interfaces–those you’re never going to modify more often than every three years, or in many of those cases you want to leave those things alone for way longer than that.

Ubuntu provides a new version of the “browser user interface, the media capability,” the full OpenOffice.org suite, not to mention the underlying Linux operating system - every six months. Of course the file system and device driver interfaces may not change for three years, but there are certainly bug fixes and improvements in that time that Linux users benefit from whereas Windows users have to wait 2 3 4 5 6 years for these kind of updates.