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Vista turns 1, and businesses start to come around ... slowly.
November 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- When Microsoft Corp. released Windows Vista to businesses exactly one year ago, near-term expectations weren't high.
Experts widely predicted that Vista, even if it was bug-free and proved to be an immediate hit with consumers, would only slowly catch on with corporations.
For instance, Gartner Inc. forecast at the time that fewer than 5% of PCs worldwide would be running a business version of Vista by the end of this year.
One year later, it's unclear whether Microsoft has met even those pessimistic projections. In July, Microsoft said companies had renewed 42 million Windows licenses that made them eligible for Vista. Trouble is, Microsoft also admitted that the vast majority of those 42 million PCs were likely still on XP, though the company claims it has no accurate way of tracking this. Microsoft has not provided a more up-to-date figure in the last four months.
According to another estimate of Vista's uptake, a Forrester Research Inc. survey of 565 North American and European PC decision-makers, after six to eight months, only 2% of corporate PCs were running Vista.
By the end of this year, only 7% of respondents plan to even start deploying Vista at all, said Forrester analyst Ben Gray in that report.
"I'll be honest, we haven't moved a lot of users," said Lee Nicholls, global solutions director at Getronics NV. While the Microsoft systems integrator has the conversion of 200,000 Windows corporate users in its current pipeline, it has so far actually moved only about 14,000 Windows users to Vista, Nicholls said.