Some industry watchers believe, however, 'that it may still be hard for many federal agencies to make a sufficient business case for spending the time and money needed to move to the platform.

Specifically, most of the major departments have invested heavily in moving their critical applications to Web-based systems, which could serve to dampen enthusiasm and demand for migration to the new OS and productivity suite, said Shawn McCarthy, a government IT analyst with IDC, based in Framingham, Mass.

"A lot of government sites have been trying to migrate more applications to Web interfaces that any desktop system can access, and that's taken pressure off the organizations on the client side," McCarthy said. "The individual agencies are under a lot of pressure to make a business case anytime they want to do systems upgrades; if they can't really justify with benefit that will be seen, the upgrade either doesn't happen or migration is slower."

The analyst said that despite Microsoft's claims that features such as improved security will convince government CIOs to get behind adoption of Vista, federal decision-makers will take a wait-and-see attitude toward the product and hold-off on moving over until the operating system's advantages are proven by others.

Other experts said that it's too early to pass judgment on government or private-sector adoption of Vista since large organizations don't typically move to new technologies quickly.