Application compatibility has been one of the reasons businesses have been slow to adopt Vista, a fact that has not been lost on Microsoft. The company on Wednesday released a white paper encouraging businesses to adopt Vista amid increasing reports that businesses will skip it in favor of the next version of the client OS, code-named Windows 7, which is due out late next year or early 2010.
The paper, "The Business Value of Windows Vista: Five Reasons to Deploy Now," is outlined on another Windows Vista Team Blog entry. The five reasons to deploy Vista sooner rather than later, according to Microsoft, are that Vista improves the security of PCs and data; unlocks the potential of mobile PCs; makes employees more productive; speeds return on investment; and reduces support and management costs.
Wednesday's report follows one released to the Web several weeks ago that outlined some "misunderstood" new features of Vista, and how customers can handle them.
It remains to be seen whether Microsoft's continued Vista promotional efforts will work. Its virtualization efforts, however, could make a better case for deploying Vista than any marketing the company has done so far, if customers begin to leverage them before Windows 7 hits the market.
Keith Brown, a network administrator for Gwinnet Medical Center in the Atlanta metropolitan area, said that his company doesn't foresee adopting Vista until next year if at all, citing application-compatability issues as a key reason for holding off.
However, using desktop virtualization software is one way to avoid that problem, and will be a great aid to OS deployment in the future once the technology is more widely used, he said. "Virtualized software allows you to work around [compatibility issues]," Brown said. "This is a big-time thing."
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