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Less Than 2 Percent of UK Companies Have Upgraded Windows

Posted by Zonk on Fri Sep 21, 2007 09:12 AM
from the just-not-that-interesting dept.
Microsoft Operating Systems Software Windows
Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista. Just shy of 5% said that they have begun a Windows Vista desktop upgrade program. 6.5% said they will upgrade in the next 6 months; 12.6% in the next 12 months; 13% in the next 18 months; and 18% in the next two years. That means that within two years from now, only 56% of survey respondents say they will have upgraded their firm's desktops to Windows Vista. 'In terms of retail sales of Vista in a box, Ballmer said he believes most of that up-tick is concentrated in the first few months of the software going on sale. He doubted that this would carry over into Microsoft's fiscal 2008, which began in July 2007. Analyst estimates for fiscal 2008 growth in Microsoft's client business unit, which includes Vista, is around the 9% mark. Ballmer said that analysts should consider that rather than creating huge spurts of new growth "a new Windows release is primarily a chance to sustain the revenue we have".'"
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  • How many... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by downix (84795) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:14AM (#20695849) Homepage
    Will downgrade new machines from Vista to XP or some alternative due to the overhead and application support? I know in my office, Vista has been vanishing, replaced by Linux running Wine for the few Windows apps we actually require.

    • Re:How many... (Score:4, Funny)

      by dermond (33903) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:17AM (#20695891)
      going from vista to linux is not a downgrade at all...

    • Re:How many... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Karl Cocknozzle (514413) <kcocknozzle.hotmail@com> on Friday September 21 2007, @09:36AM (#20696157) Homepage

      Will downgrade new machines from Vista to XP or some alternative due to the overhead and application support? I know in my office, Vista has been vanishing, replaced by Linux running Wine for the few Windows apps we actually require.

      I know we are! We rolled out 700+ new workstations this week with Vista pre-installed... and promptly wiped them for our corporate image of XP SP2. What a joke... MS is counting all of these "OEM" sales, but I bet a pretty large proportion of corporate and enterprise "sales" of Vista aren't actually being used.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by initdeep (1073290)
        And MS doesn't care because it IS a sale of the Vista OS to the OEM. What the customer does with it after that, they could give two shits about. IF you want to buy a computer from Dell (or any of the OEM's) with Vista (or XP) pre-installed and wipe it to put on another OS (say like Linux...) MS could really care less. They sold the OEM the OS. They got their money. They are happy as pig's in shit. And honestly, the OEM could care less too. It's actually a win for them too. One less unit to worry about sup

        • Re:How many... (Score:5, Funny)

          by somersault (912633) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:47AM (#20696279) Homepage Journal
          Couldn't. COULDN'T DAMNIT!!! Will someone please explain logic to the world!!!?!?!? Aieeee!!
            • I did in fact take my medicine this morning.

              "they could give two shits about" shows that they obviously could give something. Couldn't give a shit signifies that they don't care at all. FFS America! >.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by AGMW (594303)
              Both are correct and mean the same. Compare with 'cleave'.

              Could care less
              This indicates a situation where the 'carer' could actually care less, ie, to some degree, they care. This certainly isn't saying they care a lot, by any means, but they do care.

              Couldn't care less
              Now, this time the 'carer' would be unable to care less about whatever it is. They 'care' the least possible amount it is possible to care - indeed, they DON'T CARE. At all. No caring. Care free. The answer to the question "Do they car

        • Re:How many... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by pipatron (966506) <pipatron@gmail.com> on Friday September 21 2007, @10:06AM (#20696559) Homepage

          What the customer does with it after that, they could give two shits about.

          That's true for a very short time. Microsoft needs windows to be the dominating platform, at home as in business, otherwise they have nothing, nothing, to compete with. If people start using Linux at home or at work even while paying the windows tax, the same people will probably not want to pay the windows tax much longer, when they notice that a lot of other people are using something else, and that Dell actually has a Linux option as well.

      • replying because I meant to mod you "insightful" but hit "Redundant" by mistake...

        • Out of curiosity, how did you "promptly" re-image 700+ workstations? Is there some software that will net-boot them all and make it happen? If so, does it update the windows license key and everything when it does? The only thing i can think of that would do this would be netbooting them into a linux distro that grabs an img, pulls it down to each client, then writes and reboots.

          Sorry, i know this is TOTALLY off-topic, but really large scale I.T. stuff like that interests me.

          We use a product called Altiris

    • Will downgrade new machines from Vista to XP [...]

      Nothing personal, it's just that your post is the one I finally decided to comment on. Folks, the subject line is meant to be a terse summary of your post. It is not meant to be the first part of the first sentence in your post.

      I had to re-read the sentence fragment above a few times to realize that it was a continuation of what you'd typed in the subject. Many people won't bother and will take that as poor grammar before skipping on to the next message. Free advice: if you want your message to get out, don't do that.

      I've been seeing this quite a bit lately and it's irksome. Slashdot has traditionally loosely followed the metaphor of a mailing list, mainly because the crowd that originally made it popular was used to that. There's still a strong influence in that direction. There's no law or rule or FAQ that says it has to be this way, but roughly a decade of practice has made it standard.

      Thanks.

      • agree.

        Form follows function.

        At least all the information isn't in the Subject: line with "nc" in the body.
    • How many people remember when IBM was pushing their PS/2 systems, with "Micro Channel" [wikipedia.org] that was going to take over everything? It was better than ISA, self-configuring, etc. - but totally controlled by IBM. People had started buying a lot more clones and not "genuine IBM" PCs. IBM wanted to wrest control of the PC market back from the cloners.

      So they fenced in Micro Channel with all kinds of licenses and patents and expected PC manufacturers to beat a path to their door. They didn't. They worked with EI

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Dr. Manhattan (29720)

          For example ?

          "New technology" that no one really sees as worth the upgrade, with lots of extraneous restrictions (Windows Genuine Advantage, for example) that make it difficult to work with. Dell had to back down and start offering machines with XP again because people didn't want Vista. ISA was inferior to Micro Channel but "good enough" and people stuck with it until there were open alternatives (PCI). XP is still around, but MS can't afford to put much effort into it or it'll continue to undermine Vist

  • I still use Windows 2000 as my windows desktop (when i'm not using a *ix system). Nothing wrong with it - no reason to upgrade.
    • I'm also still using W2k on my desktop. In fact the last time I talked to our Sage support provider they were actively telling us not to upgrade to Vista.

      The way the outline is worded it suggests the companies that have "upgraded" to Vista have an actual upgrade policy in place, or is it just that any hardware they're currently buying has Vista installed as default.

    • Ditto. At home, I use Windows 2000 virtualized under QEMU with the kqemu virtualizer on Ubuntu, and let me tell you -- no other Windows OS runs as well...it has much lower overhead than even XP, supports virtually all apps that have been released since Windows XP, and it runs nice and fast -- near-native speed -- under QEMU/kqemu on reasonably modern hardware.

      Works great for the handful of Windows apps that I still use.

    • I used 2000 Server at home and XP at work. I can't even get my damn iPAQ to sync with Vista. I have issues with "Windows Explorer has stopped working" issues when copying files from external data stores to my PC. Picasa was causing blue screens until I uninstalled some Dell software.

      Some of this could be third party vendor (copying files oughtn't be). But Windows 'Just Works(tm)'. When it fails to do this, it has no edge over Linux.

      • 100% of Windows boxes upgraded to Vista at our home. No reason to keep 7 years old systems around.

        What do you mean no reason?

        • After 7 years, it's very solid. Pretty much that needed being fixed has been by now.
        • Memory footprint is small compared to anything newer.
        • It doesn't have activation, big plus for imaging.
        • It doesn't have restrictions against running it in vmware.
        • It doesn't have an interface desiged by Fisher Price.
        • It doesn't have compatibility issues.
        • It's got very good performance even on less than up t

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by abigor (540274)
        Hmm, my old W2K laptop still gets patches downloaded from MS via Windows Update every now and again. Does this count as support? Or were you referring to some kind of phone support?

  • Upgrade?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by olddoc (152678) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:17AM (#20695885)
    The box said requires Windows 2000 or better so I installed Linux!
  • Isn't it obvious that a business would wait until the new system is firmly established before beginning the costly and time-consuming task of upgrading and retraining (to whatever extent that's necessary)?

    • Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by arivanov (12034) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:35AM (#20696127) Homepage
      Not necessarily. Company IT departments grabbed W2K the way starving people grab hot bread. Win XP did not cause even a fraction of the same enthusiasm. And as far as Vista is concerned most company IT shops look at it as consumerware.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by HateBreeder (656491)
        That's because, windows 2K was the first (Microsoft) usable operating system intended for desktops. (Windows NT was targeted at servers) Its predecessor Win9X is perhaps responsible for the majority of Microsofts notorious reputation regarding stability and security.

        • Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by quantum bit (225091) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:58AM (#20696451) Journal
          NT was also targeted at high-end workstations, though where I work we used it for all desktops. It was pretty painful on laptops, and 2000 was a HUGE improvement in that area. Even then NT4 was better than anything 9x-based.

          2000 was a Real Big Deal. There were a lot of major improvements and very little downside. Slightly higher memory footprint than NT4, but nothing unreasonable. Every release since then has either been mostly cosmetic changes (XP), minor incremental improvements (Server 2003), or huge bloated useless "features" that you pay a heavy price for (Vista).

          Vista also sucks because the corporate bulk-license version requires activation now. The only thing that made XP tolerable was not having to deal with any of that activation/WGA BS.

  • Ambiguous results (Score:4, Interesting)

    by matt me (850665) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:18AM (#20695901)
    'In the next six months' is a subset of 'in the next year', which is a subset of 'in the next 18 months', a subset of 'in the next two years'.

    So what? In two years will 20% of business be running Vista, or 50%?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Delusion_ (56114)
      Mass Vista upgrades will occur when the problems of supporting Vista are eclipsed by the problems of supporting XP.

      Right now, the main problem with supporting XP is making sure you can actually get it on new OEM hardware.

      The main problem with supporting Vista is user resistance to UI changes, a very pushy security system without enough tangible benefits to justify it, increased memory footprint (as with every Windows upgrade) and drivers, drivers, drivers.

      I suspect there will be a few legacy XP machines at

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by walt-sjc (145127)
        If you have more than about 50 people in your company, it's pretty easy to have an Open / Select license and buy your machines with no OS. It's much harder for smaller companies however (as all the machines available to you come pre-loaded - usually with Vista now.)

        Of course some newer hardware is now coming out that does not HAVE drivers for anything other than XP, but that's another issue altogether.

        I'd really like to see MS forbidden from agreements that require bundling a LICENSE with OEM machines. I do
    • I will upgrade to vista..
      (a) already have
      (b) in next 6 months
      (c) in next 12 months
      (d) in next 18 months
      (e) in next 24 months
      (f) when hell freezes over
      (g) what do you mean "upgrade"?

  • The one thing about capitalism is that it is actually not very kind to monopolies. Investors value growth, above all else, and want to put their capital where growth of the business is most. MS can get some rate of return on existing Windows licensing, but, that's not nearly the same as doubling the size of your business from new customers every year or so, and Wall Street knows it. This influences development decisions at companies - there's no point in investing in something, if its not going to move
    • The one thing about capitalism is that it is actually not very kind to monopolies

      Funniest and least factual thing I've read all morning. Thanks for that. Actually, capitalism is kindest of all to monopolies. History has repeatedly and universally shown that unregulated markets quickly evolve to monopolies. End of story.

      Investors value growth, above all else
      Wrong again. In general, investors (the kind with 100's of millions) want ROI. ROI is achieved a number of different ways, one of them is the apprec

  • No surprise (Score:3, Informative)

    by PlatyPaul (690601) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:18AM (#20695915) Homepage Journal
    Given that there hasn't been a hard push for Vista for U.K. businesses (and that some vendors have been encouraging their customers to wait [zdnet.co.uk]), this is not a particularly big surprise. It's just too risky while Vista is this new.

    If you take a risk with a new operating system at home and it doesn't work out, you may be out some cash. If you did it across your business, you may be out of a job (and a company, for that matter!).

  • Can you blame them really? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AbRASiON (589899) * <(slashdot) (at) (scottylans.com)> on Friday September 21 2007, @09:22AM (#20695969) Journal
    The operating system is getting a very bad reception in the press and from the influential types (us guys) in IT
    See my thoughts below.
    (yes, this is a re-post, unreplied to though and obviously on topic)

    When I tried Vista it forced my Dell 8600 laptop to run it's fan in stage 2 of 3 instead of 1/3 that XP does, somewhere CPU use was too high, no matter what I turned off (Aero etc) - on battery or powered.

    The interface isn't for me, I couldn't possibly care less about a fluffy 3D interface, I've never used XP's Luna theme and I've been using XP since 6 months after release, I need a functional fast operating system with clever powerful features, I don't 'watch' my OS I use it to get stuff done.

    Another reason why I don't want Aero is I do a hell of a lot of RDP'ing and you can't get Aero over RDP.
    I would find switching from Vista classic (or XP classic) to Aero, to classic to Aero when switching in and out of my RDP sessions to be very disorientating.

    ALSO Aero seemed to offer no real actual benefits to usability, sadly I have to admit after using Mac OSX that the whole expose thing is surprisingly awesome and convienient, that operating system truely makes a mouse user damn near as powerful as a good keyboarder (wow!)
    Aero's flip 3D however was ridiculously bad at actually saving you time and effort.

    The widget thing / bar on the right was stupid, it should be like Mac OS - it's there, when you need it, hidden and very easily accessable, NOT a bar stuck on the side (auto hide or not, Mac OS wins that)

    The search functionality wasn't as good as locate32, I think in file names, not in contents, if I want my CV I search for *resume*.doc on all drives and I'll find it because I memorise the file name (admitedly locate32 isn't native to XP)

    Therefore overall Vista didn't offer me anything that honestly helped me.
    I used a full retail version of Ultimate and manage to re-produce a bug where connecting to a VPN would instantly blue screen it too (fully patched)

    I dislike the smaller 'stylish' min / max / close buttons at the top right, I like them square and easy to find.

    Did I mention Windows Explorer sucked? I spend 80% of my time in it, managing files, doing 'stuff' and it's hard to explain but there was a lack of 'lines' and dividers and bars, the data was hard to take in quickly because the interface looked,... weird I couldn't do things quicker with that, the line showing left pane / right pane sucked.
    I think (don't quote me) it forced that silly task pane on as well, which is on in XP but disable-able - I don't think you can in Vista (don't quote)

    I disliked the breadcrumb style address bar in folders at the top of explorer, admitedly just today someone found a home made patch to disable it but it's not a stock option in Vista and wasn't available when I tried it.

    When all is said and done, I would STILL use the thing if someone just made a shell replacement that made it look absoloutely 100% identical to XP classic mode but with a Vista 'engine'. I don't hate DX10 nor do I detest the search, I can always use my own, I don't have to use flip 3d but I do CONSTANTLY use Windows explorer and I need it looking nice, simple and clean to do shit fast, - I felt hamstrung :/

    • Re:Can you blame them really? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dave420 (699308) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:47AM (#20696273)
      My experience is pretty much completely the opposite to yours. I first got Vista a few months ago, and it's fantastic. Maybe it's the 4GB of memory, but it flies along. It's running two 22" monitors, and it's the fastest OS I've seen.

      Explorer is great - sure it's different from XP, but it works perfectly for me. You can turn the left pane off, the breadcrums disappear if you click (giving you the ability to type your own addresses in, or copy the current one to the keyboard, or use the mouse to quickly jump from one directory to another.) The detail view works exactly the same as it does on XP, so I didn't have a problem with being slowed down after the change to Vista. Aero does add useful functionality, such as live thumbnails in the alt-tab and the task bar. Flip 3D also has its uses, though I can see it's not for everyone.

      You can turn the sidebar off and just have gadgets on your desktop if you want. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. I have a lot of screen real-estate, so I have a clock, CPU monitor, disk space monitor, and a gadget I knocked up to track my torrent downloads at home.

      So I'm having a great time with Vista. All the software I want to use works fine with it, performance is through the roof, and I like the interface. I guess it's not for everyone :)
    • I agree about Windows Explorer. Even worse, the "expand/collapse node" controls are invisible until you mouse over! Ugh.

      But I have to say, given everything else, the most annoying thing about Vista that I have to deal with constantly is the response time. Invariably, when I click the 'close window' button, I can count to at least three before the window actually closes. And this is on a 3.5Gb machine with a fast hyperthreading processor and a very decent video card (if it's more than good enough for Hal
    • "ALSO Aero seemed to offer no real actual benefits to usability,"

      They copied OS X from top to bottom,well at least they tried to anyway, why didn't they clone Expose? It is patently absurd that the only "wow moment" they offered at launch was Flip-3D. I mean are you serious? And moving wallpaper is a Vista Ultimate only feature? More then one person must have quit at Vista over what lame eye-candy features shipped with Vista at launch.

      Vista Premium should at a minimum shipped with moving wallpaper, an expos

  • Deja Vu (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mr_Silver (213637) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:26AM (#20696013)

    Computer Business Review is reporting that less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista. Just shy of 5% said that they have begun a Windows Vista desktop upgrade program. 6.5% said they will upgrade in the next 6 months; 12.6% in the next 12 months; 13% in the next 18 months; and 18% in the next two years

    Didn't we all see a similar article like this back when XP was introduced?

    We all know that businesses work on a far slower cycle than the consumer market - hell, it was only two years ago that my work computer (I'm not in IT) moved from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.

    Based on that timescale (5 years), I don't expect to move to Vista till 2009...

  • This is meaningless. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vlad_the_Inhaler (32958) on Friday September 21 2007, @09:26AM (#20696019) Homepage
    What were the adoption figures in the early days of Win2K (which brought native USB support) or XP? Probably just as poor - at least in the case of XP.

    None of the companies I have worked for recently have been quick to adopt a new level of Windows. Anyone who expects large companies to leap aboard the Vista bandwagon now is simply deluded. The standard 'wisdom' is that Vista will only start to catch on in a corporate environment once SP1 has been released.
  • This past week I picked up my first Vista notebook (on purpose). All our previous workstations were either XP or Vista replaced by XP -- and our clients are also XP. But in the past month, I've noticed quite a few clients running Vista on their notebooks they bring in from home, and that's usually a deciding factor for near-term upgrades.

    My company has a "Not till 2008" stance on Vista. I've had horrible experiences with it and third party apps since its release, which is expected. The last week since running Vista, I have to say that the interface does LOOK nicer, but it is counter-intuitive for those who are used to the old keyboard commands to get to places. I'm sure its an easy transition, but I can't figure out the benefits, yet.

    Here's the downside: while I don't see any efficiency, the few clients who are choosing to stick with it are doing so because of the cool factor. When I explain to them that the 0.25 second "pauses" for all the flashiness (which can be disabled, of course) add up to a 1/2 hour a day in lost productivity, they don't care: it just looks cool! Engineers and designers we work with hate it, but the managements and CxOs that are our primary market love it. Ugh. Vista: The Ferrari of Operating Systems, and just as costly to repair when it breaks down, often.
    • The company I work for's main application doesn't work correctly with Vista. We only know that because client/tester told us so. We have -no- internal Vista machines and no plans to upgrade or support it yet. To be fair, our only XP machines are for compatibility and testing purposes. We're mostly OSX and I've got the only remaining Linux desktop.

      But that's not why I was replying... It's this:

      "When I explain to them that the 0.25 second "pauses" for all the flashiness (which can be disabled, of course)
      • A happy worker is a productive worker. If you save that 1/2 hour a day and the employee is constantly wishing for the fancy interface they -know-they could have, you are probably losing productivity, not gaining.

        I've spent _years_ researching desktop productivity (not in scientific environments, though) and while this may be true, I find that workers tend to be more happy in the long run by having things work as fast as they can. A slower PC worker may not notice a difference, but someone who has used PC e

    • Vista: The Ferrari of Operating Systems, and just as costly to repair when it breaks down, often.

      Well, except that Ferraris are small and lean and desirable. Other than that, sure.

  • Perhaps the business masses have yet to migrate to Vista. Well, there still isn't a service pack out for it yet and I believe MANY businesses waited for SP1 to be released for XP before they migrated. Also, MS isn't hurting that bad. Companies are still buying new laptops and desktops and guess what OS is also being purchased with them? XP.

    While MS doesn't own the server market, their OS is still are on nearly every business desktop/laptop I see. Yes, that may not be true for some Slashdot types, but it is
  • There's no SP1 yet. I know that's the case here, and I'm the senior sysadmin for about 3500 seats. There are some pluses to Vista like Bitlocker for our laptops, amongst other things. We have been doing compatibility testing with Vista for some time now, and have found the vast majority of our applications work okay, only a handful do not. Those handful of users will be refreshed with XP if the software isn't upgraded by then, and if it is, they will run Vista. Everybody runs a 2 year refresh cycle from the

  • the telling part is... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by igotmybfg (525391) <slashdot.danielthompson@net> on Friday September 21 2007, @09:35AM (#20696129) Homepage
    "a new Windows release is primarily a chance to sustain the revenue we have"

    obviously. there's not really much there in terms of day to day productivity boosters. there's nothing in windows vista that'll change the world or blow my mind. it's pretty easy to to see that this also applies to, for example, office 2007 - how many releases do they need before they get word processing right? the glaring example of this is of course the ribbon bar, imho - a UI change/obfuscation just so that people would have a reason to buy the product again.

  • It's a language problem. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Minwee (522556) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Friday September 21 2007, @09:49AM (#20696303) Homepage
    I think the problem is that the survey refered to Vista as an 'Upgrade'. Had they asked "What are your firm's plans to make your users' and IT staff's lives miserable by forcing a completely unneeded operating system change onto them?" then they might have gotten a better response.
  • How many companies have not upgraded to XP yet?

    And how many are still running Windows 98 or 95?
  • I really hope the article just did a really lousy job of explaining the study because "Less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista" strikes me as an incredibly meaningless statistic. If a company has 2000 computers, 1999 of which were upgraded to Vista, and one of which is still running XP, then they wouldn't be counted.

    If a company has a single computer that can't be upgraded to Vista then that company can never be counted as having upgraded. What percentage of
  • In fact, given that it's the number that have upgraded all their desktops to Vista, it sounds quite respectable, or at least par for the course.

    My company still has some desktops running Windows 98, how about you?

  • Rob writes "...and 18% in the next two years. That means that within two years from now, only 56% of survey respondents say they will have upgraded their firm's desktops to Windows Vista."
    Those two statements seem to contradict each other.

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