“In the latest sign that Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system may be destined for less than overwhelming commercial success, a new InformationWeek survey has found that nearly one third of businesses do not plan on upgrading their computers to the much-hyped software,” Paul McDougall reports for InformationWeek.
McDougall reports, “Tech professionals at the businesses surveyed were asked the following question: ‘When, if ever, does your company plan to purchase and install Windows Vista?'”
“One quarter of the 612 survey respondents said they were already using the new OS; 13% said they would do so in the next 12 months, while 27% said their companies would adopt Windows Vista more than one year from now,” McDougall reports.
McDougall reports, “But in what will surely be viewed as disappointing news at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA, a full 30% of those surveyed said they had no plans to upgrade their systems to Windows Vista — not ever.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Don” and “Matt” for the heads up.]
Interesting to see how MSFT plans on spinning its numbers when it reports earnings and guidance.
I *just* activated Vista on my StinkPad, like just this second. I have to admit, it’s not nearly as hideous to look at as XP was. >.<
Perhaps it’s time for the band in Redmond to strike up “Nearer my God to Thee”…
The world is running out of chairs.
Mafia$oft is totally screwed. They are going to want to get Vienna out the door as quickly as they can, BUT they need to actually make improvements to Fista, which takes time. It will be interesting to see how many of the features dropped from Fista make it into Vienna.
C1,
Let’s see how it works. Also, any feedback on build 420?
Remember the days when some of us were a bit worried that Vista might be fantastic; might make Mac OS X look bad, outdated, outclassed?
Were we really that young and foolish?
“One quarter of the 612 survey respondents said they were already using the new OS”
Also noted was that one quarter of those surveyed were having major computer system issues recently and were in danger of losing their jobs.
Good old MS will force them to upgrade by dropping support for XP sometime down the road. Just like they did for Exchange 5.5.
“So you are having problems with the new Daylight Savings changes? What version of Exchange are you running? Version 5.5, oh I’m sorry, that’s no longer supported in your contract but we can help you for $5,000.”
I wonder how many Mac users are upgrading to 10.5? I’m running 10.3 and it’s good enough for me. So far, nothing in 10.5 makes me want to upgrade but I know i’ll need to someday only because certain software or security updates will no longer run on this OS. By that time, i may have already bought another computer.
Vista, the ‘Pinto’ of operating systems.
“Remember the days when some of us were a bit worried that Vista might be fantastic; might make Mac OS X look bad, outdated, outclassed?”
nope
They may not know it yet, but…
70% of businesses will upgrade to OSX.
I got a cheapo machine with Vista installed planning to use the box as a simple fileserver and torrent downloader. Cheapo or more expensive didn’t mean much to me because I’m not planning to run anything more advanced than Azureus on it.
Know how when you start a Mac for the first time it is ready to go in about 2 minutes? With Vista it was literally an hour and half or so from first starting it to being able to do anything with it, as it spent that much time installing Vista from the OS partition.
Activated it, and went about setting it up as a simple fileserver.
I stuck a bog-standard years old firewire card in the machine–Vista blue screen of death. Wanted to swap out the hard drive and put in a 500 gig drive as C: Had to go through a whole procedure just to burn an installation disk for Vista, which is the only copy of the installation disk I can ever make.
Took that card out, and figured that since firewire was going to be iffy I’ll stick in a SATA card, take the external drives out of their shells, and put them in the machine where they’d be a lot easier to manage anyway then having a bunch of external drives with power supplies, and shells, etc.
Only problem was that now Vista insisted that it could no longer verify its genuinness and that it would have to be reactived.
Screw that–installed a bootleg XP copy, at least until linux drivers catch up with the machine.
According to Omni’s market research most (+90%) Mac users upgrade to a new version of the Mac OS within 6 months or so of its release.
The WOW starts . . . never.
Disappointing?
Nah, they’ll pull something on everyone to make sure they have to upgrade.
Yeah, it did take a little bit of forever to get Vista going, and every little thing you do elicits the super-fun Allow? button. But it’s an improvement on this machine (T42p)
And Cubert, “Also, any feedback on build 420?”
Tech services STILL hasn’t posted the build. I though they had it the other day but no luck. Checking the server aaaaannnnd… Nothing. I gotta bug somebody about it.
Re: Upgrading to 10.5
I had 10.3 and upgraded to 10.4 because of the Dashboard. I agree: some people might not find any value on it.
To me, there are a couple of reasons I would switch to 10.5, on top on my head:
1. New Mail App
2. Multiple Desktops
3. Time Machine
Again, some people might not find any value on this, but I do, and I bet a lot of people would agree that 10.5 justifies the upgrade cost.
But at the same time, 10.3 is STILL much better than any Windows, so if 10.3 does it for you, great!
I find it VERY hard to believe that one-quarter of respondents are already using Vista at their companies. Maybe they are running Vista on their own computer, but that doesn’t mean 25% of companies are already running it.
Baron,
yes I was also so young and foolish.
At least a part of me couldn’t believe that after MS had invested so much money and time, that they’d dare to bring out something so second-rate.
Happily they proved me wrong.
The remaining 5% responded ” There’s a Windows’ update?”
Of course I want to believe, but – With every new iteration of Windows about 30% of companies have always said they were not going to upgrade, but in the end were forced to for various reasons.
On the bright side, an important difference this time around is that Mac OS is rapidly being considered (seriously considered) by ever more enterprise users, now combine that with linux and Sun business tools and its just possible that MS’s OS(es) are going to be in a whole lotta hurt in the next 18 to 24 months.
“Things can change if they just will.”
MW: “must” – as in must change.
Windows Vista market share is 2.04% with a bullet… as of the end of March.
Microsoft purportedly sold 20 million Vista licenses in the month of February and I say bullshít. Kevin Kutz, Microsoft’s director of Windows Client products will probably be thrown under the bus when it’s revealed that Ballmer actually stuffed the channel with copies of Vista and called them sold. To date no one has parsed out the figures in terms of who bought what and it isn’t likely that we’ll see those numbers today, either.
I would imagine all meetings in Ballmer’s office are currently standing room only… not only because the room is overly crowded with excitable chipmunks but because all of the chairs have been removed to protect the innocent.
A Turd is a Turd.
My other half works for a global consulting firm and they are still using Windows 2000. Vista has very little hope in the corporate space.
Even corporate IT gets tired of dealing with crap on a daily basis.