Some IT Pros are under pressure to consider skipping Windows Vista altogether and making the next company-wide upgrade Windows 7.  Those that are under this pressure should take a deep breath and understand that this is crazy talk that doesn't have much reasoning behind it. 

Usually these suggestions are borne out of reading FUD on the internet, rather than fully grasping the issues at hand.  Many analysts have chimed in that skipping altogether is not a good idea.  Read the many reports here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/default.mspx 

Also well-accepted is the theory that being able to maintain two operating systems in your environment is a good idea.  This is demonstrated by the fact that rarely will any company spend the significant money it takes to 'forklift' and entire organization all at once.  There are considerable risks in a forklift approach, including the increase of surface area for failure, limitations of scale and increasing and focusing the amount of user impact to a narrow window.

An update to the Gartner report recommending against skipping Vista has been written, and in it Gartner points out that if your company uses the forklift approach, then, sure, skipping Vista may make sense.  But it will cost you a lot more money.  And if your company has the agility and maturity to maintain a diverse environment, then you have no reason to skip Vista, and at the same time you have great risk in attempting to skip Vista.

Read the Gartner report here: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol4/article4/article4.html

A true sign of a company's ability to survive in struggling economic times is it's agility.  And a strong signal of agility is the flexibility to use a wider range of software solutions, rather than a narrow one.