"You spread the upgrade pain out over several years and no department ever gets closed down entirely," he said.

Only avowed early adopters, such as Franklin Covey Co., appear set to deploy both Windows Vista and 7.

"We've been running Vista everywhere internally for the better part of the year," said Wes Radford, director of infrastructure for the Salt Lake City productivity products maker, which has about 800 PCs. "We always adopt Microsoft very early. We will probably adopt Windows 7 as soon as it is available."