According to news.com Microsoft is already planning for Vista service pack 1. I suppose that they have to with the long lead times for testing all the different hardware and applications but it seems a little strange to be asking businesses to nominate themselves for inclusion in the program before the commercial release of the product. It will be interesting to see what features are in the service pack and how soon it comes out.

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From a purely marketing perspective I think they should release service pack 1 about 10 days after the initial release. That way they could sell to all the people who say they won't buy or install Vista until the service pack comes out. And yes, there are those people out there.
The other day I heard someone say they weren't going to allow Vista on their network until the first service pack to fix the bugs. I wanted to ask them how come they thought that the same people who developed, tested, and shipped the original version would suddenly become so much better that they could trust the SP1 version any more than the original version but then I remembered the old adage about "If you can't say something nice...".
</rant>

If the speculation in the article is correct and the service pack comes out around 11 months after the release it should be available around October and hopefully in time to be pre-installed on new computers. That would be a blessing for all of the people who will be buying a new computer for Christmas so they don't have to spend the first few minutes on Christmas morning downloading the service pack.
I guess only time will tell.