• Dennis Barr, Mgr, Information Technology of the Larkin Group Inc.
• Marc Chester, Vice President, Business Development for Data Reduction Systems
• Bill Flanagan, an independent consultant in IT and particularly networking.
• David Gray, Vice President for Information Technology & CIO and CEO, UMassOnline for the University of Massachusetts
• Chris Rutkowski, IT Manager for Reliant Behavioral Health
• Wayne Wengert, a retired programmer/IT specialist

Dennis Barr: One thing that I mentioned concerning reasons why I was inclined to upgrade to Vista is the fact that it will become the standard in a year or more, regardless of my own preferences. Would anyone care to comment on the "inevitability" of Windows Vista as the all-but-ubiquitous standard for personal computing in the years ahead?

		The Windows Vista Roundtable
		•   Part 1: First Impressions •   Part 2: The Inevitability Of Vista •   Part 3: Vista For Developers •   Part 4: Is Vista A "Wow!"? •   Part 5: Final Thoughts
		•  Join The Discussion

David Gray: I agree with the view that Vista will become an inevitable standard for Windows users. In addition to individual users' choices and preferences, you will have some fairly significant corporate and institutional choices being made over the next two to three years. I doubt you will see a significant stampede away from Windows toward Linux and/or Mac. In higher education institutions (which is my frame of reference), we do see a slight uptick in Mac interest and percent of the installed base after years of dormancy. At this stage, however, it's hardly enough to be called a "sea change." It's probably a small halo effect from the iPod which, as you might suspect, is very big among the higher education client base.

What I suspect we may see is a relatively gradual transition to Vista from XP in enterprise settings, slower no doubt than Microsoft would like. From our initial testing, there do not appear to be substantial interoperability issues raised by administering a mixed environment of XP and Vista devices; hence there is little penalty from a "go-slow" transition approach. My own organization replaces PCs on a three to four year life cycle, so we will be phasing in Vista roughly over the next three years.

A bigger -- or perhaps more immediate -- question for IT decision-makers is transitional planning around Office 2007. Higher education institutions that participate in Microsoft's Campus Agreement enterprise license arrangement are advantaged by very low upgrade costs. We will probably move much more rapidly to deploy Office 2007 than Vista. Supporting divergent versions (and file formats) of Office is not something we want to do. Plus, there appear to be some substantial upgrade functionality benefits for Microsoft-centric organizations that use Microsoft Office in conjunction with MS server products such as SharePoint.

Dennis Barr: I've read that Microsoft's biggest obstacle to quick adoption of Vista is the installed base of Windows systems already in use. This includes mainly Windows XP and 2000 PCs, but there are also significant numbers of Windows ME, 98, and 95 machines as well.

I've been asked several times in the last few weeks if this or that individual should upgrade their machine to Vista. I've recommended that if a new machine is being purchased, complete with all-new peripherals and software, Vista's probably not a bad idea. On the other hand, if someone wants to upgrade an already functioning machine, I advise against it. As much fun as it is for the inner geek to mess with "new cool stuff," it's something that most people would just as soon forego.

I'm asking about the "inevitability" more in the sense of people feeling comfortable with their existing machines, and what's installed on them, than about new machines being bought. I think Bill Gates himself has said that people are keeping their computers longer nowadays, because we've reached some sort of capability plateau where most users feel pretty comfortable. There's a related issue, and that is whether Vista will become predominant before Microsoft releases Vista's successor in a couple of years, and we're told once again that Vista's insufficient for "what we want to do."