Windows Vista stuck on single digit enterprise adoption
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Legacy versions of Windows continue to dominate enterprise computing, with Windows Vista having moved very little in the last half year.
Just over two years since Microsoft launched Windows Vista, fewer than 10 per cent of PCs in the enterprise are running the successor to the company's eight-year-old Windows XP.
That compares to last July when Forrester reportedly said Windows Vista adoption was at 8.8 per cent and Windows XP was at 87.1 per cent. In that report, Forrester said Windows Vista was like "new Coke", which was killed by its corporate parent because nobody like it.
Clearly, little has changed since then, with the analyst shifting its emphasis to say Windows Vista is powering "just fewer than 10 per cent of all PCs within enterprises."
The data points have been taken from a Forrester report that tries to put a positive spin on numbers that clearly show Windows Vista is still struggling for acceptance. Forrester's report, part of an annual hardware survey, is entitled Enterprises Warming To Windows Vista.
Forrester claimed 31 per cent of IT decision-makers said they "have begun their migration" - a broad phrase that can mean many things - to Windows Vista. "Windows Vista is finally shaping out to be the operating system that dethrones Windows XP," Forrester claimed.
Forrester has also stuck with the official party line from Microsoft that Windows Vista's successor - Windows 7 - is not slated for release until 2010. This, Forrester indicates, should provide enough room for continued adoption of Windows Vista.
But word on the street - and an analysis of the Windows 7 development cycle - indicates Windows 7 will be with us in 2009, meaning enterprises have even less reason to adopt Windows Vista.
Microsoft has said there'll be no more Windows 7 betas after the current release, suggesting Windows 7 is effectively completed. If that's the case, Microsoft can't afford to have a completed operating system sitting around until 2010. That would mean lost revenue. Plus, dated features would be overtaken in the market - meaning more lost revenue.
Furthermore, the company will want to benefit from any uplift in sales from the coming 2009 holiday shopping season, especially when you consider the slaughter that was 2008.
Therefore, we can expect Windows 7 PCs in the channel by October, ready to go for November and December. And that means completed copies of Windows 7 will ship to OEMs during the late summer.
And if that's the case, it's hard to see why big businesses would want to standardize their PC platform on Vista - which will be a nearly three-year-old operating system. ®
COMMENTS
Hard to see why to standardize on Vista?
While I can't say that I'm fond of Vista, I personally can't see businesses rushing en masse to roll out an OS after only a few months compared to three years. More often than not, businesses are more likely to deploy a new desktop OS once the first Service Pack has become available, so 2010 is the more likely target for many enterprises.
The consumers will be the guinea pigs for Christmas 2009. :/
Paris, since she's always ready.
Market fragmentation
Application development before Vista was easy, you only needed to test Windows XP (unpatched, SP1, SP2) to cover 90% of the Windows market, for the next few years you will need to test Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 (+ SPs + 32/64 Bit) for the same coverage.
Given that Microsoft have lost their way with Vista / Windows 7 (and the whole managed code .NET bloat thing) and I don't fancy switching to Linux or OS X, I am considering to finnaly get involved in helping develop ReactOS (open source Windows clone). So maybe in one or two years there will be a fourth Windows flavour which needs to be taken into account.
As the price of an application or a hardware will remain the same, the amount of time and money currently spent on developing and testing drivers and applications for Windows XP (and a little bit of Vista) will in future be devided between a lot more platforms. The resulting quality and/or the profit margins will suffer.
If the Windows market is further fragmented device and software manufacturers will start considering if supporting a specific windows segment promises as much profit as supporting a competitive platform with a higher market share.
Is this the beginning of the end of the Windows world as we know it?
@AC re idjits
That percentage would be "of the windows installed base". No wonder you post as AC. Moron.
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