By Mike Ricciuti, 17 October 2008 08:51
NEWS
Some companies are planning to skip Windows Vista, and that's OK, according to Steve Ballmer. But Microsoft's CEO hopes those companies come back for Windows 7.
Ballmer said "if people want to wait they really can", silicon.com's sister site ZDNet.com's Larry Dignan reports. "But I'd definitely deploy Vista," he said.
Speaking on Thursday at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando, Ballmer defended Vista and noted that "the adoption rate of Vista is two times faster than XP at two years in".
Ballmer did note that Vista has had compatibility problems with some applications and hardware but that those problems have diminished. "We had a great success with security and starting to see a ramp [up] with adoption," he said.
Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald countered with Gartner survey data showing that 61 per cent of respondents are thinking about skipping Vista altogether. Ballmer said Microsoft would be ready for that outcome and reiterated Microsoft's pledge that Windows 7 will be compatible with Vista.
"Our next release of Windows will be compatible with Vista. The key is let's get on with it. We'll be ready when you want to deploy Windows 7," Ballmer said.
Ballmer also responded to questions about whether Microsoft would revisit its offer for Yahoo!, given the drop in Yahoo!'s share price. "We offered 33 bucks [dollars for Yahoo!] and it's $11 today," said Ballmer. "It's clear Yahoo! didn't want to sell. They probably still think it's worth more than $33 a share. I still think it makes sense for their shareholders and ours."
Finally, Ballmer again teased Microsoft's upcoming cloud OS announcement, which he said will take place at the company's developer conference in Los Angeles at month's end. "We have a big announcement in two weeks at our Professional Developers Conference and we're going to run through this stuff," said Ballmer. He said it's critical that Microsoft has a platform in the cloud.
Comments
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1. Karen Challinor
"the adoption rate of Vista is two times faster than XP at two years in"
really, I wonder if Silicon.Com could do a little analysis of their web access logs over the last few years and tell us what the relative percentages are for the operating systems of machines that access this site and how this has changed from, say, a year ago
not a brilliant test of the adoption rate but it should tell us roughly at what rate vista is actually being taken up, at least among readers of this website
2. Joe Whitehead
"the adoption rate of Vista is two times faster than XP at two years in."
Wait - isn't there more new PCs being sold each year now?