Ken Fisher has posted an article at Ars Technica which is quite a backlash at a previous blog post by James Gaskin of ITworld.com.

The original post made some quite strong claims that Vista would “cost between $3,250 and $5,000″ for each user that upgraded. These numbers do seem quite abnormally high and the Ars Technica article called the ITworld post “so deeply flawed and sensationalistic that I’m reticent to even address it”.

What this throws up is that while the figures in the ITworld article are quite high, I thought it was still worth pointing out that the Vista upgrade will cost businesses quite a lot. But it will probably take quite a while for businesses to actually make the move.

Businesses don’t like upgrading, because, as I mentioned, it’s expensive, it’s a long process and they don’t like upgrading to new software before it’s been fully tested. Certainly over here in the UK, most businesses and organisations have only quite recently made the move to Windows XP.

My point here is that it’s going to be very difficult to make accurate estimates about the cost of moving, because by the time most businesses consider doing it, hardware will likely have been replaced and we can’t really guess about the costs yet.

We won’t really know the impact of Vista in the enterprise sector for a few years yet, so there’s not much point in guessing at it.