Microsoft released Windows Vista to corporate customers in November 2006 and to the general public in January 2007. But it wasn't until 2008 that Windows Vista was actually ready for businesses. It took Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management, over a year and a half to acknowledge that the Redmond company had failed to hit the sweet spot with its latest Windows client from the get go, and that it had to work throughout 2007 to perfect it. In this context, the release of Service Pack 1 is a milestone synonymous with Vista's readiness for business adoption.

Nash stressed that an investment in Vista SP1 makes sense even in scenarios of companies dealing with a limited budget to manage their IT infrastructure not only for the favorable cost/benefit factor, but also for the fact that migrating to the new operating system would prove a good idea even after Windows 7 drops on the market.

"Investments [in security and reliability] often meant changing the way that applications and drivers run on Windows, and they impacted the initial performance and compatibility of systems. Many people saw the value of the work we had done on things like data protection, search, mobility, and deployment - but there was a tradeoff between those benefits and device and application compatibility," Nash explained.

Throughout 2007, Microsoft hammered away at the operating system in order to soften all the rough corners, struggles which culminated with the release of Vista SP1. At the same time, the company's evangelism efforts paid off, as the hardware and software ecosystem became increasingly tailored to Vista SP1. According to Nash, this is the right time to give Windows Vista, now with SP1, another try.

"It is my firm belief that Windows Vista is ready for your business. If I ran an IT organization, I would first test and remediate my applications on Windows Vista. Then I would make sure that all new machines had 2 GB of RAM and run Windows Vista Enterprise Service Pack 1. For existing machines, with modern processors and less than 2 GB of RAM, I would consider upgrading the memory, BIOS and drivers, and then loading Windows Vista Enterprise SP1," Nash revealed.