Windows Vista is just two days away. Tuesday 30 November 2006 is the milestone that will mark the operating system's availability via volume licensing. A new day for business. A Microsoft new day for business at the New York's Nasdaq stock exchange.

The official launching of Windows Vista will be an invitation only event presided by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. In fact, it will be a Microsoft software symphony as the Redmond Company releases not only Vista but also the 2007 Office System and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

With the development process out of the way, the focus will fall onto marketing strategy. Microsoft is in fact Microsoft's main competitor, as Windows Vista and Office 2007, the company's most lucrative products are rivaled by the already established Windows XP and Office 2003. Microsoft will have to reeducate customers in order to replace XP and Office 2003 with Vista and Office 2007 as the company's new cash cows.

I have said this numerous times and I stand by it. The Redmond Company will kill XP and Office 2003 in order to breathe life into Vista and Office 2007. Even at the cost of convincing its customers that XP and Office 2007 are obsolete products. And even using its own marketing to promote hardware sales.

Because there are also additional issues related to the hardware upgrades necessary to complement upgrading to Windows Vista. "It really depends on their refresh cycle," commented Forrester vice president and research director Simon Yates. "If a company has been buying new hardware on an ongoing basis over the last couple of years, chances are that anything they've purchased within the last year can be either upgraded or be Vista-ready already. The reality of the situation is that companies look at OS migrations as a project with a window of time and a specific budget and set of resources attached to it. They don't necessarily look at it as a rolling cycle the way they look at refreshing hardware. That has a more regular cadence."