In a new study, Forrester Research uncovers some good news for Microsoft: Vista usage among US businesses is up by more than 40 percent since January. The bad news: still, less than 10 per cent of the 50,000 companies surveyed use Vista.
More troubling for Microsoft may be the fact that most of those Vista installs are replacing versions of Windows other than Windows XP, which remains popular with both businesses and consumers. Forrester said 87.1 per cent of companies surveyed continue to use Windows XP.
In the report, Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel wrote that Vista is "New Coke," and saw a strong case for bypassing the release altogether.
"Windows 7 is penciled for release in Q1 2010. And who knows, by then, Apple may have even gotten its enterprise act together," Mendel writes.
Microsoft has been touting the fact that Vista adoption is actually on par with past releases, pointing to some new customers, such as the U.S. Air Force. Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte told ZDNet.com.au sister site CNET News on Wednesday in the US that at the end of June, Vista was actually tracking slightly ahead of Windows XP in corporate adoption at the same stage in its lifecycle.
But even some of the company's showcase early adopter customers are moving more slowly to Vista than originally planned. Continental Airlines said in June of last year that it expected to have 7,000 to 10,000 desktops moved to the operating system by the end of last year. As of May, it had only shifted about 2,600 machines to Vista. Continental now expects the majority of its machines to be on Vista by the end of this year, according to a recent white paper.
Is Vista still kicking around? WOW!