I came across two Vista related stories on Techmeme this morning.

The first from Ken Fisher on Ars Technica, talks about how Microsoft’s OEM partners are struggling with the number of customers who want to downgrade their computers from Vista to XP. Ken goes on to state

the “must wait for Service Pack 1” meme is also so firmly established that Vista uptake will continue to be soft among businesses for quite some time, certainly into early 2008 when we expect to see Vista’s first service pack

Then I read Mary Jo Foley’s story about how Vista’s first service pack (SP1) will be released in Beta next week and released to the public in November after an unusually short testing time of four months (previous service packs have taken up to a year in Beta before being released).

According to Mary Jo,

here’s a list of other fixes likely to make it in:

* Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines (Yeah, I know Microsoft said Viista shutdown speed wasn’t an issue. Guess users weren’t so crazy, after all.)
* Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
* Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
* Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
* The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
* Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

Two things occur to me
1. The haste to get SP1 out the door seems to speak to nervousness on Microsoft’s part about Vista sales. No surprise there. Vista is still quite buggy and
2. If SP1 is rushed out the door, there is the possibility that bugs will be introduced by SP1 which will further erode confidence in Vista!

Microsoft need to tread quite carefully on this one.