I see Gartner is finally getting on board the "Skip Vista" bandwagon, a bit too late to be of much use to any audience which might have made productive use of the analysis, but anyway, you know, welcome.

More surprising is the quote later in the same article from Senior VP for Windows Bill Veghte:

If you're just starting your testing of Vista, with the [Windows 7] release candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the release candidate, and use that going forward.

Is Microsoft finally admitting defeat on Vista? Probably not, and it doesn't really matter anyway. The market has passed them by, just as it has done Gartner ("More than half of businesses plan to skip Vista anyway, Gartner's analysts noted") and the irrelevance of the company's stance is merely revealing internal fractures that had always been there.

While both Gartner and Microsoft have simply picked up the goalposts and moved them to Windows 7 instead of Vista ("We advise organisations to move off of Windows XP by [the end of 2012] to avoid application support problems, even though Microsoft will support Windows XP into April 2014" say the Gartner analysts... which is remarkably similar to what they were saying about Vista when it came out: "the motivation is invariably not to obtain the new features or capabilities offered by Vista, it's to ensure they keep their PC installed base within Microsoft's 10-year support cycle.") I'll go one step further and say it's worth careful and hard consideration at this point for CIOs as to whether or not it might be prudent to plan to stick with XP indefinitely... to make no plans for upgrades at all.

Even if XP has served you well thus far, I wouldn't suggest you adopt it into perpetuity. But I would suggest that perhaps, software being what it is, that it is no fatal conclusion to determine to use it for as long as it serves its purpose. It's not going to rust out and fall apart, after all. As long as you have machines physically capable of running a 32 bit (or 64 bit, if that's your flavor) operating system, it will work exactly as it has done for all these years. Windows 7 is newer, and it is better... but it's not clear to me that it's enough better for most purposes to justify business adoption. Waiting a couple of years might present you with alternatives which are worth the transition. Will you Handcuff your organization to Windows simply because it's available? Or do you see the possibilities on the horizon, with the rapid expansion of utility computing and commodity services, and want to keep your options open?

It will be an unconventional choice for those who make it, but I believe it may also be the correct on in a surprisingly large number of scenarios.