The beta is already out and has been for some time now. It's not bad. The beta is extremely polished, near production quality. Claims have been made that it beats XP SP3, which I don't buy for a second if you use the same hardware for testing. Folks are claiming it is faster in starting up and shutting down than XP or Vista, which might be true. The stack loading is pretty efficient compared to Vista, I'll grant. They gutted UAC like a fish. The device manager feature has some improvements. And they're trying to make a huge deal out of including a few more fonts, which are available in the thousands online.
Aside from aesthetics, it's basically what Vista SP1 should have been. It's essentially just Vista, minus a few real charlie foxtrots and modest performance improvements. I'll be positive. It's a step in the right direction.
Unless the RTM is significantly different than the current beta (near total rewrite, that is), my company will give it a pass until 2012 or so. Obviously, we will NOT be implementing Vista whatsoever. Our reason is very simple. Vista grants us zero performance or productive gains (quite the opposite), coupled with expensive training costs that would be required for nearly all employees. We'd have to be flat out insane to upgrade. We pay the same costs regardless, as we have an enterprise agreement with MS.
Every major company I am familiar with has made the same business decision. I am not familiar with a single large corporation that is en masse upgrading. I know of a few that are doing "large looking" downgrades to Vista at a location or two that won't cripple production. I'm familiar with a few were hoping to gently start phasing in Vista machines into their environment. Microsoft unofficially promised a lot of large companies that SP1 would un-CF Vista, so they shouldn't wait until Win7. SP1 turned out to be strictly bug fixes and patches, effectively zero performance improvement and absolutely zero interface improvements. A lot of companies are extremely displeased at shelling out significant money for "software assurance" clauses that would have allowed them to upgrade later "at a fraction of the cost". The scam was "Go ahead and buy XP today, plus x%, and you can upgrade to the next OS which is absolutely wonderful at no additional fee later." Well, obviously no large company is upgrading to Vista. That money could have been spent better if it was burned in the parking lot. Companies are wary that Microsoft is pulling another Vista SP1, and won't pre-buy licenses. They're waiting for a potential sucker to invest heavily and see what happens.
