It’s been many months, so you may have forgotten, but Windows Vista is going to have a bit of a strange rollout.
While most users won’t see the operating system until January, when it hits store shelves and ships in brand new PCs, some businesses will get their copies next month as part of the volume licensing program. That means the long wait for Vista is actually going to be over in a matter of 4-8 weeks.
Microsoft says it expects to deploy 60,000 seats of Vista worldwide on launch day, sometime in November. Mary Jo Foley quotes:
That figure is ten times the number of seats usually deployed by Windows users at launch, said Brad Goldberg, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Client Business Group.
After all, the biggest test of an operating system is whether corporate customers trust it, not the general public, so Microsoft is trying to show superb confidence by finding enough companies willing to take the Vista plunge early. Don’t be surprised if those brave souls are getting an additional discount, since they’ll be stress testing the biggest project in the history of software development, and risking their employee productivity on it. Sure, Vista’s been beta tested for months, but no one knows how exactly it’ll stand up to the harshest of conditions, and the early adopting companies will be the first to find out.
Good luck to them.
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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