Mary Jo Foley obviously has good contacts in Microsoft. She already knows that the beta of Vista’s service pack 1 is about to launch in mid-July. Vista SP1 RTM might be released in November 2007. This is certainly much earlier than many have expected.

I wonder if the Google-Microsoft case is behind this. It is most likely, however, that Microsoft just knows that many corporate customers wait for the first SP before thinking of a Vista rollout. As far as I could think back, we always deployed a new Microsoft OS only after the first SP has been released.

The list of new features in Vista SP1 that Mary Jo Foley posted confirms this assessment:

  • Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines (Yeah, I know Microsoft said Viista shutdown speed wasn’t an issue. Guess users weren’t so crazy, after all.)
  • Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
  • Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
  • Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
  • The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
  • Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

Except for the BitLocker enhancement, there is nothing really noteworthy in this list. However, there might be some more new features. Let’s wait until next week.