I know you've been keeping a bottle of champagne on ice for a special occasion... Well, it's time to pop it for the celebration of Windows Vista's one year anniversary; the business SKU of the latest Windows client, anyway. One year ago today, Microsoft was making available Windows Vista, the Office 2007 System and Exchange Server 2007 to its corporate clients. The company's main cash cows and Exchange were delivered to Microsoft's Software Assurance customers via volume licensing. The official launch featured Microsoft Chief Executive Office Steve Ballmer, on location at the NASDAQ headquarters in New York.

"Steve highlighted how Windows Vista, 2007 Office System and Exchange Server 2007 will help companies seeking to run "people-ready" businesses. With Windows Vista and 2007 Office System, users now have tools that will help them do their jobs more efficiently. In part, this means finding the right information at the right time - usually right now. (...) Now that businesses have access to Windows Vista and 2007 Office System, we've only just begun," revealed Microsoft Product Manager Nick White back on November 30, 2006.

One year later, Microsoft claims to have shipped to its channel partners worldwide some 88 million copies of the operating system. Still, various reports from Forrester, King Research, SunBelt and Panda indicate that Vista adoption in the corporate environment is well under the 5% share predicted by Gartner on the operating system's launch. Moreover, all indications point to the continuation of the slow adoption momentum for Vista until 2008, with just a third of businesses planning to migrate to the operating system.

Vista currently owns a market share of 7.9% according to data released by Net Applications. Windows XP has dropped to just 79%, Linux climbed to almost 1% and Mac OS X is at over 6% of the market. For the first quarter of 2008, Microsoft plans to release Service Pack 1 for Vista. A Release Candidate of Vista SP1 is reported to come in the first week of December with the first public milestone of the service pack going live by the middle of next month.