Microsoft, it turns out, is not a big fan of advice that you skip Windows Vista in favor of taking a closer look at Windows 7. They've put out a new whitepaper listing five, count 'em five, reasons why you should not wait for Service Pack 1. How does this relate to Windows 7, you ask? Keep reading.

And those reasons are in addition to gems such as this:

Microsoft® recognizes that cautious IT managers may prefer not to deploy a new product soon after its release. However, with Windows Vista, many of the traditional reasons to wait, such as waiting for the first service pack, do not apply.

Oh, I didn't realize! Silly of us to think that a rule of thumb created precisely because such statements could never be taken at face value is now obsolete because they say so.

The official reasons, apparently, are these:

• Improves the security of PC's and confidential data
• Unlocks the potential of today's mobile PCs
• Makes you and your people more productive>/li>
• Reduces support and management costs
• Speeds ROI with rapid deployment and migration

The only one of those I might be able to get behind is the first, but it is one of the major things which makes a lie of the last three. The productivity studies they cite for support are the same Microsoft-sponsored ones that we've been suspicious of all along. The whole thing is a muddle of wishful thinking and circular logic, particularly when you get to the bit where they discuss how compatibility between Vista and SP1 will be good, but compatibility between XP and vista sp1 won't be... as if somehow that eliminates all the existing compatibility problems you might have moving to Vista from XP today.

While almost all these reasons are ridiculous given even minor consideration, the real stinger is that it appears that this whitepaper was originally intended not to address customers seeking to delay migration to Vista in order to wait for SP1, but those choosing to skip Vista entirely in favor of Windows 7. Mary Jo Foley seems to have gotten her hands on an early copy of the whitepaper, where SP1 references are replaced by Windows 7 references, and she's written a fairly in-depth post on the subject. Her link inside that post (which is the same that I have included at the top of this post), however, leads to the SP1 version.

This raises an awful lot of questions. Was she provided a doctored copy? If so, by who? If not, is there another version with almost identical wording? If not, why was the wording changed from Windows 7 to SP1? Is 7 going to be, in reality, simply a Vista service pack which will be marketed as a full-price OS product? Or was Microsoft suddenly struck with fear that they might be giving people ideas, and that the reasoning in the whitepaper was thin enough that those who hadn't previously considered waiting, now might?

What seems clear in all this is that Microsoft is running scared from the "Wait for Seven" meme, and hasn't been able to find an effective counter for it yet.

EDIT: Removed redundancies.