Last May I discussed the importance of proper, thorough planning when considering your corporate software standards and the associated upgrades. Now that Windows Vista is fully available to corporations (with the consumer release only a week away), please keep in mind the importance of planning this out and review the total cost of upgrades and what actual ROI you will see… Please, keep in mind the reasons why you WOULD upgrade… At this point I don’t see a single valid point to upgrading, at least until Microsoft has released service pack 1 a bit later this year.

I have included below two fairly comprehensive lists: 10 reasons to upgrade to Vista and 10 reasons not to. These two lists are available with associated annotations and explanations at apcmag.com and were written by Dan Warne and Ashton Mills, respectively. Please note that some given reasons are not entirely true, in particular Mills’ statement in #10 about ownership rights and license transfers. I’ve discussed this in greater detail here. However, overall I think the cons outweigh the pros by a healthy margin; for now. There will be a time where your organization should implement Vista, but there is always time for testing and planning this upgrade, so let’s not to add to Microsoft’s margins just yet.

“10 reasons you should get Vista”

1. UI built for the era of video and digital photography
2. Image-based install
3. Up-to-date driver base and better driver handling on installation
4. Desktop search and search folders built in
5. Sleep mode that actually works
6. Rock-solid laptop encryption
7. Better file navigation
8. Inbuilt undelete
9. DirectX10
10. Face it, you have no choice

“10 reasons not to get Vista”

1. You don’t actually need it
2. Cost $$
3. On that note, it’s outrageously overpriced
4. Upgrading hardware
5. Driver support
6. Applications that don’t
7. It’s a big fat target
8. UAC
9. DRM
10. The draconian license