NEWS
Take-up of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is starting pick up with US businesses.
Just under half (48 per cent) of US IT decision makers are using or evaluating Vista, according to a poll by IT services firm CDW.
This is CDW's third Windows Vista tracking poll since October 2006 and shows a 19-percentage-point increase in take-up since February 2007.
Vista: all the coverage...
1. Don't put Vista in schools, says education agency
2. Details of Vista SP1 revealed
3. Poll: Vista gets vote of no confidence
4. Poll: In a fight between Vista, OS X, Linux, XP...
5. Vista: Piracy rates half the level of XP, says Microsoft
6. Vista not grabbing businesses... yet
7. Microsoft still bullish about Windows Vista
8. Poll: In a fight between Vista, OS X, Linux, XP...
9. One year on: XP still outshining Vista
10. Vista - businesses not convinced
Vista migration is also increasing with more than a third (35 per cent) of those surveyed saying they are in the process of moving to Vista. In comparison, just 12 per cent said this last February.
Thirteen per cent of these migrations are complete and another third are due to be finished by May 2008.
CDW says this shows Microsoft's latest operating system is now seen as a more viable option in the mainstream business market.
Of those still testing and migrating to Vista, almost half said its performance and key features are "above expectations" with the top-rated features being security, performance, productivity, search and updates.
Mark Gambill, CDW VP, said the past year was one of "adaptations and learning for Microsoft, industry partners and adopters alike".
He added that since people have begun to understand the benefits of the OS there has been a "steady move toward adoption".
The CDW survey also found an increase in Microsoft Office 2007 adoption with almost a quarter (24 per cent) of businesses saying they'd made the move, compared to just six per cent in the last survey.
The poll was conducted by Walker Information and covered 772 IT decision makers.
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Why change if what you have does the job.
2. Chris Stevens
Refresh XP to Vista when you have to upgrade the hardware. There is no real gain from Vista over XP so why take all of the hassle and cost of upgrading?
Vista needs more hardware resources to run sensibly so there is a (not so) hidden cost of upgrading to Vista.
So the bottomline impact for your organisation is more spend with no gain.
We run both operating systems side by side and will gradually phase out XP as we replace hardware. The "expired" hardware may just be repurposed to run a suitable LINUX distribution, with energy costs being part of the decision equation.
For Servers ...well that is another topic.
3. Andrew Robb
There was similar resistance to XP. This largely died away after SP2 brought better support for wireless and USB2 along with security that was less bad.
Vista changes things that hackers used (albeit in large software houses that should have known better) and breaks a lot of old applications.
Let us hope that SP2 for Vista will see the demise of unsigned 32-bit drivers - this would be a really significant watershed.
I have unloaded Vista Home Premium from my new laptop.
4. David Wilson
Perhaps the reason that more IT departments are evaluating Vista is related to Microsoft's schedule for eliminating sales and support of XP and earlier versions of Office.