Susan Hall spoke with Brenda Cooper, futurist and CIO for the city of Kirkland, Wash. (pop. ~ 46,000), a Seattle suburb adjacent to the city that's home to a large software maker.

Hall: When we talk about Vista vs. XP, how many machines do you manage that would be affected?
Cooper: We have about 450 desktop and about 50 servers. And I work a lot with other cities, so I know a lot about what a lot of us around here are doing or not doing.

Hall: So are you migrating to Vista?
Cooper: We chose not to migrate to Vista for two reasons: for one, many of our applications don't yet run on it. The application for our police dispatch system, for example, was waiting for SP1 to come out before they even began testing and working with it. We're probably a year behind in even having the ability to migrate to it. We can't run it if core systems don't work with it. And the other reason is that it's really slow. I have it at home and I like how it works. I like the new security features, etc. But frankly, XP is nearly twice as fast.

Hall: So do you consider it a viable option for enterprises to completely skip Vista?
Cooper: Maybe. It's not viable for most enterprises to upgrade to Vista yet. Whether to wait for Windows 7 is a good question. If they [Microsoft] were to actually come out with it in 2010, then sure. Microsoft has yet to come out with a major release within even a couple of years of when they say they're going to deliver it. I don't want to wait until 2012 or 2013. It's gotten so unwieldy, too. To do an upgrade is such a huge task. We can't go to Vista for another year or so. We'll just watch what Microsoft does now.

Hall: But some have questioned why anyone would think migrating to Windows 7 would be any easier than transitioning to Vista. What do you think?
Cooper: It might even be bigger or harder than stepping through them. In Vista, Microsoft did some things we asked them to. As an IT community, we asked Microsoft to increase security and make it better, and they did that. I want the security features of Vista and if they can get it to be faster, there might be reasons for me to try to implement it. As it is right now, if you look at the teeter-totter of things I want vs. the things I don't want, the pile of things I don't want is too big. They might incrementally get it to where I want to implement it and it might be easier to step from one to the other. We've never implemented a Microsoft product before SP1. I just can't afford that kind of instability. So if Windows 7 comes out in 2010, we couldn't implement it before 2011 and by 2012, I might want something entirely different.

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