Less Than 2 Percent of UK Companies Have Upgraded 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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Investors will slow Windows releases.

[tjstork]

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 price of the shares. At this point, Windows is a good business, but all Microsoft can really do in the OS point is stay put or lose.

Re:Ambiguous results

[Delusion_]

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 a lot of offices that move to Vista, simply because there's a lot of office hardware that's fairly expensive, and whose manufacturers don't consider it a priority to update drivers for - specialty printers (wide format, high throughput small format) come to mind. If you've got a $7K-35K printer, odds are keeping it running in XP is a more attractive option than buying a new one merely because the manufacturer won't write a Vista driver for an eight year old machine that's still working like a champ.

Deja Vu

[Mr_Silver]

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.

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

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.

Re:This is news?

[arivanov]

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:This is news?

[HateBreeder]

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:How many...

[initdeep]

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 supporting.

It's a language problem.

[Minwee]

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.

OT: Purpose of the subject line

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:This is news?

[quantum bit]

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.

Re:How many...

[pipatron]

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.

Re:Ambiguous results

[walt-sjc]

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 don't mind if they ship pre-loaded with an unactivated copy that you can LATER purchase a key and activate, or OPTIONALLY buy a key for it that ships at the same time, but they (and system OEM's) should be forbidden requiring you to purchase a license for windows just to buy the hardware. This would be a huge win for volume license customers who don't NEED the OEM copy, but end up paying for it anyway. It would also help restore competition to the OS market which is effectively nil at the moment.

Re:Can you blame them really?

[Toon Moene]

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.

Not surprising. When 4 GB, quad core laptops become a commodity next year, I'll finally be able to run our Numerical Weather Forecasting system that needed a 50 CPU Sun Fire 15000 until November 2006, at home.

It won't run at full speed (rather at 1/4) - but the machine has enough memory to run it without swapping.

It's time the Free Software types like me put our full weight behind Windows Vista - at least it keeps Moore's law up and running !