"Home users shouldn't wait," Zipkin said. "The Vista user experience isn't changing with SP1, and compatibility is improving on an ongoing basis. We've got stuff coming down the pike that will hit well before SP1." There are also a number of out-of-band functional improvements to Vista that are happening outside the SP1 track that will significantly increase Vista's appear to consumers. I'm thinking of Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail specifically, both of which expand dramatically on capabilities that are built into Vista.
Corporations, Microsoft says, are already moving to Vista, and the arrival of SP1 shouldn't change anything. "Our business customers already have the tools and guidance they need to deploy Vista," Zipkin said. "Some are waiting to deploy, but they can do some pre-SP1 work to hit the ground running. They can begin application compatibility testing on the SP1 beta or Vista gold [RTM] code, as the compatibility picture isn't changing. There are architectural changes moving from XP to Vista, but that's a remediation you will need to make with SP1 too." Microsoft is planning a "fairly broad" SP1 release candidate for later this year and expects many businesses to start pilots at that time. "There's no need to stall things because of SP1," Zipkin said."