I don't see anything in the article that I haven't seen quite a few times before. Manufacturers are always planning the next product even before the current one ships. That's normal.

Businesses are always holding back on their platform changes. It was that way when Win3.1 came out, that way for Win95, that way when Win2000 (98 and ME were pretty much not in the picture for major business use) and WinXP came out. WinNT 4.0 is still probably slugging away on a lot of business desktops because it still works. If it handled usb and did a better job with pictures, I'd bet a lot of people would be saying you didn't need anything more. 

I'm not putting a judgement on Vista itself. I've never run it, and probably won't see it for some time. XP does the job at home for me, as did 98SE for a lot of years after XP hit the market. XP, 2000 and WinNT 4.0 still run on all the desktops at work. So we're still using a 10 year old OS on some computers.

That's normal. Farmers still use 30 year old tractors for production work, and nobody is saying Deere and CNH need to design totally new tractors to make them change. Well, I guess I have heard it; "the newfangled stuff is too complicated, give me back the good old whatever". Deere and CNH answered by introducing simple value tractors. What happens? You read on the other board to stay away from them, they are junk. You can't win!

I do know a lot of businesses end up changing to the new OS as their employees start demanding it. The employees get used to the new features at home and starting insisting they can do the same thing at work. So the IT manager may say he has no plans to upgrade, but he probably doesn't know about entire sub-departments that already have made the switch because they wanted to do something only available in Vista.