With Microsoft's latest operating system barely out the door, it may seem a little presumptuous to talk about the next major upgrade for Vista. But the question that many IT organizations will be wrestling with over the next few months is whether it's worth it to embrace Vista today or wait for the future major upgrade that might be less than 18 to 24 months away.

According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft still has plenty of work to do in the operating system space, specifically around the areas of support for multicore processors, better TCP/IP integration, improved file system management, enhanced graphics and video, better systems management and greater enablement of software as a service. And perhaps most significantly, he's also promising customers that they won't have to wait another seven years between major upgrades of Windows.

The question this brings up on a corporate level is whether Windows XP is good enough today for the vast majority of users and therefore whether they should skip Vista all together in anticipation of something better down the road that might, contrary to past Microsoft experience, come sooner than later.

The primary corporate drivers for a Vista upgrade are lower operation costs thanks to better management tools, a more secure platform and increased productivity thanks to better search and visualization capabilities. But a lot of customers already rely on third-party applications that they have installed to lower operation costs and that provide more security. And while productivity is an interesting argument, it's one of those soft benefits that typically defy any hard return on investment analysis. Furthermore, killer applications that really take advantage of the visualization capabilities of Vista are most still a year away.

In addition, the much anticipated Longhorn version of Windows Server is also likely to be a 2008 upgrade phenomenon for most companies, which begs the question about whether it's worth upgrading to Vista in the absence of the server upgrade that is really designed to drive the next generation of Windows clients.

Furthermore, in addition to Ballmer's pledge to deliver the next-generation client operating system upgrade sooner than later, it seems probable that changing user application scenarios are going to push Microsoft to roll out the next-generation client operating system as fast as it can.

Today according to Advanced Micro Devices, people are already on average keeping eight applications open on their systems at a time. And as video and audio become a bigger part of the typical user experience, demand for a more robust client that is really optimized for multicore processors and better integrated video and graphics is likely to bring a lot of pressure to bear on Microsoft's Vista upgrade timetables.

In addition, Microsoft will have to start backing up a lot of its "Smart Client" verbiage sooner than later because as quad processors become common in server environments, the amount of intelligence that will be available on the server is going to make the client look comparatively stupid unless Microsoft can get the next-generation client platform out by early 2008.

All of this may combine to essentially orphan the Vista offering that Microsoft is just now getting up a head of stream. No matter how you cut it, an operating system that was first conceived of five to seven years ago is not going to be in lock step with either the processing power that will be available in the next 12 months or user demands that are shifting more towards the PC being a delivery vehicle for multimedia than a platform for locally running applications.

In this business, timing is everything and as much as Vista represents an improvement over Windows XP, you can't help but wonder if at least this version of Vista is going to be a victim of, well, bad timing.