Should you move to Vista or wait for Windows 7?

Corporate customers this week were informed by Microsoft that the migration from XP operation system to Windows 7 will unlikely be easier than the shift from XP to Vista. Gavriella Schuster, a senior director of Windows product management, noted that ‘moving XP to Windows 7 is not a magic bullet’. The level of compatibility between XP and Windows 7 is the same as it is between XP and Vista. But those users who have already shifted to Vista will feel more convenient when moving further to Windows 7.

On their official blog web page Microsoft company provided some recommendations on whether they should upgrade to Vista or wait for the release of Windows 7 that was scheduled to come later this year or at the beginning of the following year. While a great number of companies are still running their XP OSes instead of moving to Vista, Microsoft insistently recommends that business customers upgraded as soon as possible inasmuch as security and remote-management capabilities in both Vista and Windows 7 were not equipped into the original XP release.

Customers still running Windows 2000 ‘clearly need to move fast and need to move to Windows Vista’ as long as support for Windows 2000 ends in April 2010, and it will take a company 12 to 18 months to complete the upgrade. Such users cannot wait for Windows 7, warned Schuster.

As it is known Windows 7 will be on the same code as Vista, but it will not be for the first time Microsoft makes such kind of release. Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro were built on the same code base as well when major part of business customers were waiting for XP instead of shifting to 2000. In fact Windows 7 is the second release of Vista with some usability features added. Therefore, moving from XP to Vista will be as painful as it will be to move from XP to Windows 7, notes Al Gillen, an analyst with IDC.