100 Things You Must Know About Microsoft's Most Important Product Launch Ever 2100 Things You Must Know About Microsoft's Most Important Product Launch Ever 2

Upgrade Path
How will customers upgrade? And when? According to an October survey of 672 IT professionals by information Research, 10% will install Vista on existing PCs, 25% will bring Vista in on new computers, and 65% will do some of both. Thirty-nine percent plan to deploy Vista within a year of its release.

As with earlier Windows releases, the business rollout will take years. But Ballmer expects businesses to take up Vista "a little bit faster" than they did Windows XP, if only to protect their companies with Vista's improved security.

Competitor Ken Bisconti, VP of product marketing with IBM Lotus, isn't convinced. "I've yet to find a single customer that's going to upgrade Windows separate from hardware upgrades as part of their normal refresh process," he says. "For most customers, that's a 2008 event."

Bisconti sums up the skepticism that dogs Microsoft every time it puts customers through a new software cycle. "Microsoft is still running a pre-Internet business model that expects the world to forklift upgrades of proprietary operating systems and proprietary applications," he says. "Do I really need more word processing features? The innovation in business value and technology is not dependent on a particular operating system or version of Office."

Still, Microsoft's vast installed base remains the envy of other software companies. Can Ballmer pull another rabbit out of his hat? Anyone who has seen this act before will be watching every move.