Windows Vista SP1: No longer “so important”

A new research report by Gartner advises IT decision makers planning to deploy Windows Vista that they should not wait for Microsoft to release Vista’s first service pack (SP1), which is due in early 2008.

This advisory resulted from Gartner’s analysis that placed Windows client service packs “important”, but its value is now less than what they used to be.

Gartner’s research vice president Michael Silver, in the report entitled “Vista SP1 is important, but less so than SPs of the past,” said: “Windows client service packs are important, but not as important as they used to be.”

While many organizations plan to wait for the release of SP1 before starting to test and deploy Windows Vista, Gartner finds that such move no longer so advantageous for enterprises.

“Microsoft has become very adept at deploying updates through services like Windows Update, Microsoft Update and Automatic Update, so SPs are now less important than they once were,” Silver said.

However, the report also pointed out that “Many organizations have highly complex PC environments and would not be ready to deploy Vista before [the second half of 2008], so SPI will not be in the critical path form them.”

Despite SPs are becoming less important, skipping the initial release of Microsoft Vista and adopting an SP1 offers one big advantage.

“Microsoft will only support the prior SP for 12 to 24 months after the next SP ships (in this case, 24 months), ” Silver said. That means that the original Vista release will be supported only until the first quarter of 2010, if Microsoft ships Vista SP1 in the first quarter of 2008.

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