I'll wait until SP1 comes out...

Couple of days ago I received an E-mail from the IT department. The subject was Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. In the E-mail he takes a position that became quite popular lately: Don't bother installing newly released software because we are not going to support it until SP1 comes out. The usual IT concerns about things not working as expected and being so different that actually nobody can use them and so on... This is not the first time I see IT departments taking such position and in many occasions this is a good rule of thumb to let "the other guys" figure it out first. Big corporations have a large number of installed base and run complex applications so this may be the way to go. On the other side of the spectrum the small guys are often too fragile to make big investment in a technology before it becomes mainstream, so this approach might be OK for them too.

Nevertheless I cannot justify such position when it comes from a mid size stable software company, which on top of this claims to be innovation leader and Gold Microsoft Partner. It just does not fit.

One other principle of software development I recall is dogfooding. This is when you use internally the software you create and sell to improve further your development. In the same line of thought this principle is applicable for third party software you integrate with. Naturally Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 fall in that category, since we already develop software running on these platforms.

So my question is: If a software company wants to be on the fast track of innovation, does it wait until SP1 of Product-My-Platform comes out, or starts its evaluation and use as the RTM (or even BETA) release become available?

Dovizhdane!