Microsoft has announced that they expect businesses to deploy Vista quickly—twice as fast as the XP launch, in fact. By Vista's first birthday, proud papa Microsoft hopes that it will have doubled the deployments of XP in the same time period.
Microsoft chalks this up to massive beta testing and better deployment tools like the "User State Migration Tool" and the "Application Compatibility Toolkit." The deployment features are meant to make the product enterprise-friendly, and the multiple rounds of testing should give businesses the confidence they need to deploy Vista within months, or even at launch. So goes the theory. What's the reality?
While there's a lot to like in Vista, it's difficult to see what compelling features businesses won't be able to live without for another year or two. Having a "Windows Preinstallation Environment" will be nice, but IT departments don't roll out OS upgrades simply because they're not as difficult as they used to be.
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