Despite research that found Vista uptake among businesses is slowing, Michael Dell has predicted that most companies will migrate to the OS within two years.
Dell's chief executive has predicted that most of his company's business customers will migrate to Vista by 2009.
Speaking to journalists at Gartner's ITxpo Symposium in Orlando, Florida last week, Michael Dell said: "We have a number [of business customers] who have gone to Vista, and almost all are planning to go to Vista: some in 2008, and some in 2009. As they take on new IT deployments with new hardware features, Vista will be much better supported."
However, Dell's assertions run contrary to research published earlier in October by market research company Context, which found that Vista sales for business machines were slowing.
Context found that Vista Business accounted for 13 percent of PC sales among European IT distributors in August 2007 -- down from 17 percent the previous month. Meanwhile, XP Professional accounted for 27 percent of PC sales, but it also saw poor growth, with August's figures down by four percent compared to the previous month.
Vista Business is the direct successor to XP Professional.
silicon.com's Gemma Simpson contributed to this article.
ZDNet UK's Tom Espiner reported from London.
Mr Dell hopes that this is the case. Within two years there will be dramatic change in the industry, including new players in the market and a better concept other than a 'bloatware' desktop to perform business activity.
I know for one that Vista is not suitable for many businesses, including the price tag and no compelling reason to change, including also the impact on the environment - businesses will look at alternatives to throwing out PC's just because they dont reach Vista's minimum requirements.
Personally, I think Mac and Linux and thin clients will take a huge chunk out of Microsofts OS dominance in the workplace.