Windows Vista: The ‘Eh’ Starts Now
by John Paczkowski
Posted on November 19, 2007 at 5:37 AM PT
Good thing Microsoft’s bottom line is largely unaffected by the poor reception given its new Windows Vista operating system. Because according to two new surveys, Vista uptake isn’t likely to improve much in 2008.
In a Forrester poll of nearly 600 European and U.S. companies that have more than 1,000 employees, 84% of all their PCs now run Windows XP, up from 67% the year before. And though nearly a third of respondents said they would begin deploying Vista by the end of 2008, 17% said they wouldn’t do so until 2009 or 2010. “The big story isn’t that 32% of the companies we surveyed said that they would start Vista deployments by the end of next year,” said Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray. “It’s that companies have been hugely successful in standardizing on Windows XP.”
A study by King Research arrived at a similar conclusion. Ninety percent of the 961 IT professionals surveyed said they’re leery of migrating to Vista and more than half said they aren’t planning to deploy Vista at all. Why? Stability, compatibility and cost, says security vendor McAfee. “In 2007 there has been less than 10% market penetration for Vista,” David Marcus, security research manager for McAfee Avert Labs, told ZDNet.co.uk. “There hasn’t been a huge adoption. Most people haven’t upgraded because of the hardware upgrade needed. XP is still robust, and is sound with SP2. Most businesses are looking at it from the point of view of, ‘Why change out for some nice graphics when XP does what we need?’ “
Previously:
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