Today's Vista launch is just the beginning

After years of coding, bug-testing and a few early skirmishes with rivals and regulators, Microsoft's next operating system will finally launch "to businesses" on Thursday. The question now is, who will want Vista, and when? It is widely accepted that Vista take-up will be a gradual process over the next few years, particularly in the enterprise market. The consensus among IT professionals is that there is little to gain, and potentially a lot to lose, by being part of the first wave.

"I'm not in any rush to deploy it. We're only just finished rolling out XP. I'll wait at least six months and then look at it," said Andrew Vorster, vice president of technology for Visa in Europe.

Vorster explained that he had been a Vista beta user, testing the operating system on a laptop. "It was so resource intensive. It took 20 minutes to come out of hibernation," he told ZDNet UK. This review of Vista, after the code was released to manufacturing, shows that Microsoft has made progress since those early betas.