What's a Vista business user to do?The Scarlet V

Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing and is obviously the operating system that Microsoft and its partners will be pushing for the next two-plus years. If you’re one of those business users who is in the midst of deploying Vista, what should you do?

But in May, around the time Microsoft delivered the near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of Windows 7, Windows execs stopped saying much at all about Vista. In fact, it was like pulling teeth to get them to talk about Vista Service Pack (SP) 2, in terms of discussing features, fixes and/or availability. At the company’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, the message was clear: As of May, any marketing campaigns that had been using the word “Vista” should be switched to refer to “Windows.”

Mike Angiulo, General Manager of Microsoft’s Planning and PC Ecosystem team, said Microsoft is not casting off its Vista users.

“We are not abandoning our existing Vista customers,” Angiulo said. “A three-year cycle is the right amount of time” for the delivery of a new client operating system release to users, and that’s just about how long it will be by the time it makes Windows 7 generally available, he said.

“A year ago, 87 percent of our commercial customers were on XP. Many are looking to skip a generation and go straight to Vista, Windows 7″ said Jim Ginger, Global Lead of Dell’s End User Services Computing Practice. (Sorry: my mistake on that one… MJF)

But like Microsoft, Dell is insisting that the Windows 7 push won’t mean that Vista users get left behind.

“They can continue with Vista or start rolling out (Windows) 7. The two are similar enough that they will work harmoniously together” so having a mixed Vista/Windows 7 environment shouldn’t be an issue, he said.

The Air Force, as of April of this year, had deployed 90,000 Vista laptops and desktops, according to one of my sources who has knowledge of the details of the contract. The Air Force evaluated and tested Vista between December 2006 to June 2008 and initially deployed the operating system among select bases to about 10,000 users before going further. The Air Force moved to Vista because of the security assurances it offered over XP, according to my source.