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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.
Gaining corporate acceptance
Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, has been hearing the same kinds
of anecdotal evidence that Vista may not be having the sort of corporate impact
that a new version of Windows would typically create by this stage in its
lifecycle. However, he notes that at least one typical behavior has started to
kick in.
"[Corporations] are now accepting Vista coming in on new machines, even if
they're not replacing older machines as quickly," Bajarin said. Typical of most
Windows roll outs, many corporate IT staffs will take the new system off of new
PCs coming into their shops and replace them with the earlier operating system –
until a point where the new system has achieved enough momentum that they
finally start leaving it in place.
That appears likely to continue ramping up as Microsoft discontinues
availability for Windows XP through most outlets as of this week.
In addition, Microsoft shipped Vista SP1 to volume licensees in late February.
At least until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that conservative IT
shops wait for the first service pack of a new Microsoft operating system to
ship before they begin to deploy it.
This time the cycle appears to be tardy.
To be fair, SP1 has only been available for just short of four months, so it's
hard to determine trends. Still, SP1 didn't cause any sudden jump in adoption
either, according to an April report from IDC.
"Microsoft's release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista during the past quarter
is expected to eventually raise the desire for businesses to deploy new PCs
using Vista, but the impact in 1Q 08 was very slight," IDC said.
So what's still holding Vista back? For many IT shops, it just offers too little
for the increased hardware requirements and loss of some application
compatibility, leading to increasing costs at a time when budgets are being
squeezed like a toothpaste tube, according to one technology consultant.
"Most corporations are not really eager to jump into Vista [because of] the
inertia problem," Ajit Kapoor, principal and managing director of The Kapoor
Group, a global consultancy for aligning business with IT expenses, told
InternetNews.com.
Aero Glass interface isn't enough
What he means is that Vista, even with SP1, is not compelling enough to trigger
full-scale upgrades in many large shops. XP is very stable by this point, plus
it is very secure so Microsoft's pitch that Vista is more secure is not a large
driver for IT. That leaves the Aero Glass user interface and other graphics
features to drive adoption, or not.
"Aero Glass is fun but it doesn't increase productivity," Kapoor added. Before
starting his own consultancy, he was chief architect for the CTO's office at
Lockheed Martin, and held similar positions at Allied Signal and General Motors.
What about waiting for Windows 7?
"That's also a consideration," Kapoor said. "[Some large clients] are waiting to
see what Windows 7 does, but it's not with any urgency," he added.
Bajarin agrees.
"They'll wait for the older XP machines to die and bring in new PCs with Vista
[to replace them], but I think a lot of them will also wait for Windows 7,"
Bajarin added.
Many observers warn, however, that waiting for Windows 7 may not be a smart
move. Windows 7 the codename for the next major release of Windows is currently
scheduled to hit the streets in late 2009 or early 2010. Of course, when Windows
7 is released, corporate shops will have to go through the whole testing and
deployment process, so actual deployments could be delayed again.
Meantime, several leading analyst firms are predicting another record-breaking
year for sales of new PCs. For example, earlier this month, Gartner pegged sales
worldwide at 297 million this year, a 12.5 percent jump from last year.
Research firm IDC echoed Gartner, but was even more aggressive. IDC analysts
predict sales of 310 million PCs this year 15 percent increase over 2007.
"Keep in mind that we're still shipping 300 million new PCs this year and the
bulk of those are Windows Vista machines," Bajarin said.
In fact, Gartner reported in May that Vista is actually making headway inside
some corporations partly replacing aging Windows 2000 deployments but also
slowly eating away at XP Professional numbers as well.
According to Gartner's report, XP Professional usage fell from 71 percent in
2007 to an expected 63 percent this year, and will fall to 47 percent next year.
Meanwhile, Vista adoption is slowly picking up steam, partly because Microsoft
shipped Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) last quarter. So a trend appears to be
emerging.
The Gartner report has Vista usage rising from 4 percent last year to 19 percent
in 2008, and then doubling to 39 percent in 2009 as corporate deployments kick
into gear.
"As a percentage of the professional installed base, Vista is in a more advanced
position than XP was at the same point [of its lifecycle]," George Shiffler, a
director of research at Gartner who compiled the data in the report, told
InternetNews.com back in May.
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