Microsoft's vagueness on a service pack release is forcing customers to play a chicken-and-egg guessing game.Microsoft's silence on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 availability is another sign that enterprises and solution providers must make deployment plans independently of the update.
In November 2006, a Microsoft executive told eWeek that Microsoft would simultaneously release Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1. But not long after that, Microsoft stopped talking about SP1 availability and removed projected release information from its life-cycle support Web site.
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In late June, Microsoft broke its SP1 silence out of necessity, but the information the vendor has shared creates even more uncertainty about when the update will be available. In an agreement with government trustbusters, Microsoft will change Vista search defaults. The change will come with the Vista SP1 beta, which Microsoft says will be available before mid-November 2007. But the company refused to commit to a delivery date on final SP1 code. The prospect of a Vista SP1 release in 2007 increasingly dims, with analysts beginning to characterize delivery as a "delay."
Already, numerous businesses, including major Microsoft partner Intel, said they won't deploy Vista until SP1's release.
"Any delay in SP1 will delay commercial rollouts," said analyst Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. Kay took a fairly pessimistic view on the impact of a delay. If Microsoft delivers SP1 in the first quarter of 2008, early deployments would start around the third quarter, with mass deployments beginning in early 2009—or a "year late," Kay said.
Previous analysts' projections had put early Vista deployments in the third quarter of this year, with mass deployments starting around the second quarter of 2008. But some of the projections assumed that Microsoft would release SP1 in the third quarter or a little later.
Julie Giera, a Forrester Research analyst, said Microsoft's caginess on SP1 is indicative of a bigger Microsoft problem. Vista's launch "isn't going as well as they expected," Giera said.
If there aren't many customers deploying the operating system, Microsoft has much less incentive to release a service pack. However, if customers are waiting for the service pack before deploying, Microsoft faces a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario: Which comes first, adoption or the service pack?
Microsoft hasn't left its channel partners or enterprise customers many options with respect to SP1. The waiting game puts solution providers in between Microsoft, which isn't saying "when," and customers saying SP1 must come before Vista deployments.
For many businesses, the best action would be giving up SP1 as a deployment milestone and using the next planned hardware release cycle as an opportunity for moving to Vista. Solution providers should advise customers to take SP1 out of their deployment plans, unless they already planned to do early testing and deployment in mid- to late 2008.
Some Windows customers already are hinging Vista deployments on hardware. Allen Emerick, director of information for applications and integration at Skanska USA Building, in Parsippany, N.J., said his company will move slowly to Vista. The construction group, which employs 56,000 people worldwide, will roll out Vista with new hardware, starting next year.
"We want to take advantage of the operating system, and we think we need to have more powerful hardware to do that," Emerick said.
Solution providers that let SP1 set the agenda for customer Vista deployments could be waiting well into 2008 for the upgrade and any new business from it.
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