* As Vista's ship date is a moveable feast, when should we start planning for the OS?
I got a copy of a Microsoft newsletter the other day headlined: “Windows Vista is coming soon. Is your business ready?” My first thought was that, given that it has been a lo-o-ong time since Windows XP first shipped and that the predicted ship dates for Vista were first proposed a while back, most people had finished their planning some time ago.
And maybe that’s the problem.
Back in April 2002, we reported that most folks were saying that Vista wouldn’t be out until the second half of 2004. In the same newsletter, we said that even though we were then, still over four and a half years from what may actually be the shipping date for Vista, there were many so-called “Windows gurus” who were adamant that you had to start planning to add the new desktop operating system to your enterprise network. So many of you, probably to hedge your bet that you didn’t believe it would ship anytime soon, wrote up plans based on the 2002 version of what the platform would include. Some of you probably updated those plans in 2003 (when we reported that Vista wouldn’t ship before late 2005). A few may even have continued to update the plan in 2004 (when it appeared that Vista wouldn’t be available until 2006).
The reason the plans had to be updated had less to do with timeline and more to do with feature set – each further delay in Vista’s ship date was accompanied by changes in the feature set for the operating system. And it was rarely additions to the features that needed to be accounted for. Rather, features were being removed, consolidated, renamed and completely redesigned. Any plans made in 2002 being read now by someone with the latest release candidate for Vista would most likely appear to be about some completely different operating system.
If you had made your plans two, three, or even four or more years ago and left them to gather dust on a shelf (or “digital dust” in a long forgotten desktop folder) it might be time to gather them up and update them. Even better, it might be time to scrap them entirely and start over from scratch. The “Get Ready for Vista” Web site might be just the place to start. Maybe, just maybe, in this case the procrastinators are ahead of the proactive planners!
