Senior Vice President John Dragoon also found the timing of Microsoft's latest delay to his liking, as he opened a multimedia tour of Novell's latest desktop suite based on the competing Linux operating system.

"Why, I feel bad for them," he quipped, holding up a copy of USA Today with a headline trumpeting, "Microsoft Delays New Windows" as the Salt Palace convention crowd of several thousand cheered.

Dragoon noted that the current test version of Vista had reportedly been found by reviewers to be short on "finesse, polish and general impressiveness" in its bid to replace Windows XP, which debuted in late 2001.

"I don't know if you guys knew that [Vista] was originally expected to be ready by end of 2004," Dragoon added. "The last time I checked, it is 2006."

Microsoft says its consumer version of Vista will be released in January. Corporate buyers who purchase volume licenses should be able to get the upgrade in November.

Novell's SUSE Linux 10, along with its family of desktop, communications, mobile and networking applications, is ready now, Dragoon said.

"And I can guarantee that what you see today [in the conference demonstration] will be impressive, will have polish and will give you hope and confidence that there actually is a legitimate choice," Dragoon said.

Even with its latest troubles rolling out the next generation of Windows, Microsoft continues to dominate the computer OS market with an 85 percent to 90 percent share. Novell's Linux suite, while critically acclaimed, still lags behind RedHat Inc.'s versions of the "open source," or freely distributed, OS.

Matt Friedemann, vice president of engineering, and Guy Linardi, senior products manager, said Novell programmers and open-source community contributors had labored more than a year to produce a family of new Linux products for the PC desktop.

Testing of the new software also involved study groups made up of ordinary users who were asked to perform typical tasks, such as browsing the Internet, sending e-mail, creating a document or using a Web cam.

Engineers monitored the groups, regularly reviewing, tweaking and re-testing products before they were deemed ready for release.

"Geeks are nice, but there are a lot of other 'non-geek' people in the world, and we wanted to reach them," Friedemann said.

bmims@sltrib.com