I often blog about the outlook for Windows Vista as Microsoft launched it in the marketplace few days ago. There have been many articles of late on how good or worse the timing for Microsoft launching its new operating system. Though Microsoft remained optimistic about their newly commercial product, the outlook about Windows Vista is unclear at this moment.

A reputable market intelligence provider, IDC released a press news and expected with calendar year 2007 deployments of Windows Vista projected at 90 million copies. This largely contrast to Windows XP, when first launched Oct. 25, 2001, there are 67 million copies of Windows XP sold in the first year as announced by Microsoft. If the prediction by IDC is true, there will be an increased of 23 million copies. To put that figure into perspective, Microsoft would see a 34% gain over first year operating system shipments.

I believed IDC’s report is based on the prediction of growing number of PC users in the world. In contrary, I came across an article mentioned that the corporate America is not ready for Windows Vista now. According to a Canadian market research firm, Softchoice released results from their own survey, and found that 94 percent of existing PCs can’t run Vista Premium because of the heavy graphics requirements. They believe half of existing PCs can’t run Vista at all because of the heavy processing and memory requirements of the new operating system. They doubt the organizations will make a substantial investment in their IT hardware infrastructure in order to deploy Windows Vista.

Obviously, there are some pros and cons of Windows Vista launched, we would only know how market response to Windows Vista from Microsoft’s press release one year later. However, assume that Microsoft will not provide security patch to Windows XP when Windows Vista officially launch to the public in January next year, the users will no doubt have to invest in their new hardware and upgrading to Windows Vista, the question is how soon Microsoft will pursue that kind of product strategy.