Wil Shipley bets Bill Gates that Windows Vista won’t ship by January 2007

“Hey, Bill, you recently went on record saying that you felt Windows Vista had an 80% chance of shipping by January, 2007. Fine, I’ll take that bet. I’ve got $10,000 that says you do NOT ship by then,” Wil Shipley blogs for Call Me Fishmeal.

“You ask why? Because you can’t throw money at every problem to solve it, Bill. You can’t just keep adding engineers and money to a giant, ugly mess and hope that, eventually, it’ll become a polished, tight piece of art. No art was ever created by committee. Nothing great was ever designed by 4,000 engineers. Ever,” Shipley writes.

“You said, ‘If the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I’d be glad to delay it.’ Glad? Really? Well, get used to happiness, I guess. Because you know that, if you’re lucky, in January you’re going to squirm and weasel and release a ‘limited version’ that you ‘recommend’ only for, uh, say, professional IT guys who only have one eye, and suicide kings. Then, when you get a bunch of press on how crappy that version of Vista is, you’ll quietly cut more and more features from it until you end up with the ‘home’ version, which will look mysteriously like XP with some new paint,” Shipley writes. “But what do I know? You’re the billionaire, I’m just some dude with a blog and a fistful of design awards.”

Full betting proposition here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Wyodor” and “vitaboy” for the heads up.]

MacDailyNews Take: Are you with Wil or are you with Bill? Do you think Windows PigLipstick will ship to the great unwashed by January 2007 or will it slip slide away again? Bonus question: Will Apple release Mac OS X Leopard to the general public before Microsoft inflicts Windows Vista?