While Microsoft has confirmed November 2006 and January 2007 as the official release dates for Windows Vista, the company has also put forward forecasts related to the adoption of the operating system. Referring exclusively to the business environment with Vista scheduled for volume license availability in November, the Redmond Company expects Vista to outperform Windows XP by being deployed in a volume more than double compared to its predecessor.

"Vista is built for businesses," said Brad Goldberg, general manager for Windows product management. "We're giving businesses the tools they need to get out of the gate faster with Vista... Our goal is to have twice as fast deployment of Vista than for any other operating system."

Initializing Vista's market performance, Microsoft has announced that 60,000 Vista seats will be released on launch day by the enterprises who have been involved in the testing process of the operating system. With this initiative, the Redmond Company intends to catalyze the deployment of Vista as the number of Vista seats is ten times larger than the number of XP seats.

"For them to do 20% in the first 12 months of availability is almost impossible," said Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC, in the context in which Windows XP has found its way onto 10% of enterprise machines in the first year. "They have done all the right things, but adoption is going to be driven by corporate adoption and deployment cycles, more so than by whether Microsoft has greased the skids to make the product glide in faster."