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Is Vista Still a Flop With IT?

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Windows Vista’s demise have been exaggerated. Somewhat, at any rate. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. recently released a report that indicated Vista still isn’t ringing many bells with major IT shops. “A year of overwhelmingly bad publicity, coupled with opportunities for continued XP ‘downgrades’ or potentially skipping over Vista […]

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SJJ

Stuart J. Johnston

Jun 23, 2008

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To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Windows Vista’s demise have been exaggerated.

Somewhat, at any rate.

Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. recently released a report that indicated Vista still isn’t ringing many bells with major IT shops.

“A year of overwhelmingly bad publicity, coupled with opportunities for continued XP ‘downgrades’ or potentially skipping over Vista for Windows 7, look to have meaningfully eroded support for Vista and are likely to impair the product’s overall adoption,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted the report as stating.

That was seconded last week when analysis firm Computer Economics weighed in with early results of its own recent poll.

“The preliminary results from our annual IT staffing, spending, and technology trends survey indicate that most organizations are still not including Vista in their plans for 2008. Many are not even planning, as yet, for an eventual migration,” the firm said in a statement.

“Widespread adoption of Vista could still be a year or more away, which raises the possibility that Microsoft could begin to see its dominant share of the corporate desktop market erode with this desktop upgrade cycle,” the report continued.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) does not break out sales of Vista from sales of its other “supported” operating system — Windows XP.

However, tech analyst firms disagree on whether Vista is already past the prime it never had or is just beginning to take off.

In fact, sales of Vista to consumers are going swimmingly, according to Microsoft.

CEO Steve Ballmer said in late May that retail sales of Vista have now passed the 150 million unit mark. Additionally, by now, the vast majority of new PCs sold at retail come with a copy of Vista pre-installed.

In addition, despite all the talk in the media of the new fad of users buying a PC with Vista and then downgrading (even at additional cost) to XP, reports of that occurring have been hard to verify, say several analysts.

“I haven’t seen any reliable numbers on the numbers of people who are buying Vista and downgrading to XP,” Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told InternetNews.com.

That doesn’t mean that some large corporate customers aren’t downgrading, of course. King said, however, that the slower adoption rate is as much the result of a poor economy as anything else.

“In the middle of a severe economic slow down, you have businesses tightening their belts,” he said. That is causing companies to put off buying new PCs, which is still the primary avenue for Vista to enter the enterprise – a long-established pattern for new versions of Windows.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.