Vista SP1 spotted in the wild, coming soon?

Microsoft has been mum on the topic of when we'll see the first service pack for Windows Vista for a while now. Perhaps they're simply trying to see how long those "I'll buy Vista when SP1 is out" folks will wait before eventually caving in? Regardless of the reason, Microsoft has been quite vague about the launch window for Vista SP1, leaving some folks to wonder whether there will even be a service pack at all (In theory, the company could simply push all the updates out via Automatic Update). Well, we now have some hard evidence that, at the very least, Vista SP1 exists. The rogue service pack was spotted in the flesh and photographed running on a demo machine at last week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles. In the photo, the version number appears as "Windows Build 6001 Service Pack 1, v113." Keep in mind, however, that the service pack could have been developed for internal use only.

So what's the verdict, will there be a Vista SP1 or not? There's no way of knowing for sure until we get the official word from Microsoft, though Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry did have this to say on the matter: "It appears that a number of people within Microsoft think that the full fledged service pack is no longer needed, because Windows Update provides a mechanism to get fixes to customers. Because everyone can download the fixes they need as soon as they are released, there is less need to have rollups or service packs...The only thing keeping me thinking they would do a service pack was to formalize the delivering of the PatchGuard API (application programming interface) to the software vendors who need it."

For more on Windows Vista SP1:
- see this ZDnet article