By Tim Ferguson, 2 April 2008 14:52
NEWS
Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is taking a while to catch on, with just 6.3 per cent of enterprise users on the OS by the end of 2007.
And according to research by Forrester Research, most upgrades were from users of Windows 2000 - which lost around six per cent of users - rather than XP, which Vista is intended to replace.
Vista: all the coverage...
1. Windows Vista SP1 finally a go
2. Microsoft slashes Windows Vista price tag
3. Microsoft: 'These programs won't work after Vista SP1
' 4. Some to get Vista SP1 this week
5. Vista SP1 finally ready for manufacture
6. Do US businesses want Vista at last?
7. Microsoft refreshes Vista SP1
8. Don't put Vista in schools, says education agency
9. Details of Vista SP1 revealed
10. Vista: Piracy rates half the level of XP, says Microsoft
Around a quarter of enterprises plan to upgrade to Vista in 2008 although Forrester said companies may change plans and wait for the release of Windows 7 - pencilled in for the second half of 2009.
Adoption of Microsoft's latest browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has also been sluggish with just 30 per cent of enterprise users on it 15 months after its launch.
Slightly more than 70 per cent of those surveyed were still using IE6 at the end of last year, despite the imminent arrival of a beta version of IE8.
In contrast, Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 virtually replaced Firefox 1.5 the same period after its release.
The proportion of users on Firefox actually doubled during 2007, with 18 per cent using it at the end of the year. The proportion of users on all versions of IE fell by 10 per cent.
The survey quizzed more than 50,000 users from 2,300 large enterprises over the course of 2007.
Comments
There are 7 comments. Join the discussion
1. Nick Cole
Not surprising.
People, individuals as well as organisations want stability and a period of benefiting from investment. They do not want to continually learn new interfaces and ways of doing things that were well understood before. They do not want frequent re-training, re- engineering, systems adaptation and amendment.
They also do not want to be made to do things just becaause Microsoft want to keep moving their goalposts and repackaging at considerable expense existing functionality.
2. W.S.Becket
I wonder how many firms follow our example. Replacement machines have to be purchased with Vista because there is no choice. However, before they are placed in service the Vista is removed and XP installed. (Yes, we have amassed a goodly supply).
I see no reason why we should have to upgrade all our software and much our hardware simply to please Mr Gates.
He should note from the above however that his rather depressing sales figures for Vista are probably overstated.
3. David King
Obviously a lot of companies have spent a lot of time and effort into getting their systems working how they want, and do not want a huge upheaval of replacing the OS and software with something that looks quite different. The change from Windows 2000 to XP was easy as they two OSes look similar, but Vista is deliberately different and thus a lot of time and money would be spent by companies to get their users up to speed on Vista. With the current economic downturn, I think that more companies will be looking at free open source software to replace their current systems, as that will be a lot cheaper than going for Vista. Either way they have to retrain staff, but cheaper to train them to use something open source, which costs nothing or very little compared to Vista.
4. Karen Challinor
a Vista upgrade is much too expensive for the somewhat marginal improvements you get over XP, then there is the extreme likelyhood of being forced to upgrade the base PC just so Vista can run at a reasonable speed, so the vast majority of sales are the bundled or leveraged sales on new PC's
plus XP will work quite happily with the peripheral equipment people already have, there's a good chance Vista will require people to replace these peripherals as drivers are not available, despite a Vista driver for a new device probably being quite capable of driving the old device (assuming the same manufacturer) after all the manufacturers don't reinvent the device command set every time they make a new device the only major difference is the identification sequence the device gives to the PC
then there are the restriction it gives you when you use it, built in DRM and a nagging UAC that can't tell the difference between an event started from the console and an event started from a web page
so I'm not surprised Vista take up is slow
5. Sarah
I get my new laptop tomorrow.
The first thing I will be doing is removing Vista (that I had no choice to buy with the laptop) and installing XP Pro.
Then I intend to install Ubuntu (dual boot with XP), as this is the route I will be taking in the future.
6. anonymous
Also, how many of the corporate 'Vista' licences are being used with XP Downgrade rights !!!
7. Andrew Robb
I don't suppose my 'upgrade' from Vista to XP Home would be counted against the number of Vista users.