How Many Will Jump to Adopt Microsoft's Windows Vista when it Releases?

The question Microsoft - and many other companies - want answered is both a simple and straightforward one, yet one that may not be so easy to divine. Specifically, that question is how many will rush to deploy Windows Vista, the next "great" update to Microsoft Windows, when it debuts anywhere between November of this year and January of next?

It matters to other companies for many reasons, including those that have products that depend on compatibility with the upgrade, who offer deployment assistance personnel, or just question whether they should jump on the Vista bandwagon. Much of corporate America, to be certain, runs on looking about to see what competitors and colleagues are doing before the decision makers flip a coin to determine what their operation will do.

Of course, with Microsoft, release dates are always a bit of a pot-boiler. Their release date schedule, like their math, can slip significantly.

It's no wonder that more than a few office pools, especially in IT departments, concentrate on when really Microsoft will release a much-heralded product. Corporate deployments of major upgrades, after all, have to be set up months ahead so that when a product slips a date, more than just the software publisher of record takes a hit.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many companies took big financial hits in rushing to upgrade. The result was, especially around the time of the bursting of the overall tech bubble around 1999 and 2000, a greater and greater reluctance to hurry to deploy new products.

The running joke for a very long time was "never install version point zero of anything." Like any good joke, this is based on some reality: the first to upgrade are often the first to experience the problems not worked through during the beta cycle. A fast-paced office environment is usually no place to take on the role of inadvertent post-beta tester. They paid for their site licenses and they expect what they bought to work. Who can blame them?