In an interview, Gavriella Schuster, a senior director in the Windows product management group, urged businesses to move to the embattled operating system now, even if they plan to move to Windows 7 when it ships,

"If you're running Windows 2000, you should definitely move to Vista today," Schuster said. Those using the more than 7-year-old XP, which she described as being on "life support" should consider "how much money am I spending keeping XP alive, versus moving on." Microsoft also debuted a new blog called to market Vista to its corporate customers.

She urged companies to check when their vendors plan to pull support for their applications on Windows XP and to start testing the Windows 7 beta today.

Windows 7's arrival by this year's holiday season could boost sales of PCs to consumers. But an earlier arrival, combined with the economic downturn, could with Microsoft's most profitable customer segment, businesses and large organizations.

Vista has been available to corporations for 27 months. Larger enterprises may take that long to test, prepare and deploy a major operating system upgrade like Vista due to the extensive application compatibility testing and employee retraining that is required.