Allchin believes that the adoption curve for Vista among consumers will be "fast and immediate." While conceding that businesses will need to "decide on their own whether to deploy quickly or wait for their refresh cycle," Allchin said that improved management and deployment features such as an already-available application compatibility testing kit should speed up rollouts.

"The reasons for waiting just aren't there," he said.

Allchin also touted Vista's improved security, with features such as Address Space Layer Randomization, which makes each Vista machine sufficiently different that the chance for worms to jump from one Vista PC to another is "much smaller."

Vista has been five years in the making, and represents the longest lag time between releases of Windows in Microsoft's history. The company has said that it does not expect the development of the next release of Windows to take nearly as long as this one did. Although Microsoft is not committing to timetables, company officials have said that they are targeting a time frame closer to two years than five years for the next OS release.

The next release will most likely represent a more incremental change than does Windows Vista, which includes major changes to the user interface, as well as highly revamped security and networking capabilities.