Some informal thoughts on Vista (excerpted from an email to one of my consulting clients, with some additional content):

I can see how Vista, due to its tightened security scheme (rather than bugs), might cause trouble when trying to attach it to a pre-existing networked environment. I haven't had the chance to experiment with that type of a setup. I should though. I recall that rolling out XP Service Pack 2, at the time it came out, required that I do a few tweaks on the server-side to make XP SP2 work optimally. This was mitigated eventually, to some extent, by the release of Windows Server patches and service packs. For Vista, in this area I don't think that Vista SP1 will help much; instead, tweaks/adjustments to the server-side will probably still be necessary, just because of Vista's hardened (and "in-your-face") security model. This may/should change when Windows Server 2008 comes out early next year.

There are also reports that Vista's TCP/IP stack may have some incompatibilities with certain older router/firewall firmware.  Some SonicWALL firewalls running older firmware are affected.

I've been using Vista Ultimate 64-bit on a newly-built desktop computer since about April (it's my main computer). It has been working fine for me. I have encountered problems only with some of the drivers for my leading-edge hardware. Those drivers have been buggy and the vendors have needed time (and user feedback) to work out the bugs. At present (six months in to the release of Vista), I would say that capable vendors should have resolved all of their serious bugs at least (true, wrt my pc). And Microsoft has released quite a few patches over Windows Update. For me, the core OS has been very stable and never crashes. I'm very pleased with it.

Big contrast to Beta 2 of Vista. They came a long way since early/mid 2006 in getting Vista ready for release.

That said, I don't see the need for businesses to rush out and upgrade to Vista. I've kept my ThinkPad T43 on XP and have no plans to upgrade it. XP is still entirely capable from a business-need perspective, and businesses that have highly centralized and managed networks will have to do their homework before upgrading everything to Vista. For those types of companies, they'll just stay at XP (even for new computers) until they get their environments set up to support Vista. I think a lot of the talk about business waiting for SP1 really comes down to their IT departments needing the time to do the necessary integration work on the server-side. And IT staff need time to get trained on the differences within Vista (e.g. control panel layout is quite different).

As a consultant, I would have no problems with helping clients roll out Vista, if the client desired to go with Vista. That is, I wouldn't try to talk them out of it. It has been stable enough for me that I trust it. Of course, from a business viewpoint I don't see much need for Vista either. So if you all prefer to stay with XP2, at least for now, I'm all for that. I wouldn't try to talk you into doing Vista. :-)

With respect to Vista, there is definitely no huge need for businesses to rush to Vista. However, Vista does represent a huge design and programming effort on Microsoft's part, and a lot of Vista's improvements are behind-the-scenes and really won't show their effect for 1-2 years out from its release. Microsoft has done a lot of work on Vista's "plumbing" (kernel, APIs, etc) to improve performance and to dramatically improve the security of the OS (a lot of code rewrites and a from-the-ground-up approach to security that is paying off). The security aspect is most beneficial to non-savvy home users, and it will help protect everyone against certain future threats. Businesses such as yours (and savvy end-users like you) that are proactive with security and anti-virus and other security apps will not benefit nearly as much as typical home users. Microsoft has completely redesigned the video subsystem, which will allow for better gaming (once the gaming companies rewrite their applications) and other video-intensive applications (again, rewrites will be necessary). For now, most end-users see all that Vista work as just a pretty new interface <grin>.  Ironically, a lot of the talk about Windows XP when it came out focused on its pretty new interface.  For Windows 2000 users, there wasn't much advantage in switching over to Windows XP.  Even today, when on travel, I see a Windows 2000 laptop here and there.  But, over time, the current Microsoft OS tends to seep in and eventually become dominant.  It happened with XP, and it will happen with Vista.

Beyond the display/video, Microsoft has also designed and have begun implementing a new multimedia architecture to replace some of DirectX. Several of Microsoft's major efforts have been on the system management side (making Vista easier to roll out and manage in huge corporate environments); other types of users will not see/experience those benefits. Vista's built-in search mechanism is very powerful, but Microsoft has mitigated that advantage (and the effort that went into it) by releasing the search engine for use on Windows XP (since they have to counter significant competition from other desktop search providers). The same is true for the IE 7 part of Vista. Let's see, I think that covers most of Microsoft's major work. In the end, from an IT perspective, I would describe Vista as being a foundation effort that Microsoft will be able to build on for years to come. Eventually, companies and users who are running Vista will start to see/experience some of those improvements relative to XP.