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".'"

How many...

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...

going from vista to linux is not a downgrade at all...

Re:How many...

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:How many...

Couldn't. COULDN'T DAMNIT!!! Will someone please explain logic to the world!!!?!?!? Aieeee!!

Re:How many...

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.

OT: Purpose of the subject line

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.

Windows 2000

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.

Upgrade??

The box said requires Windows 2000 or better so I installed Linux!

This is news?

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?

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?

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

'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%?

Investors will slow Windows releases.

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.

No surprise

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!).

Sadly

This means only 44% of IT departments have a clue.

Can you blame them really?

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?

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 :)

Deja Vu

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.

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.

I just added a Vista notebook to my collection

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.

more MS doom and gloom

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 true for the rest of the working world.

Everybody is waiting because...

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 their start date, so that's how we refresh PCs.

the telling part is...

"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.

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.

Maybe never...

I work at a company with about 7,000 engineers. We have not adopted Vista yet and I would be suprised if we did within the next couple of years. In fact all new machines may ship with Vista, but when they arrive they are loaded with XP or Linux.

Also, I would expect it would be at least a year before we adopt Office 2007.

I work at a government laboratory and security is the primary issue.

Lets talk numbers

How many companies have not upgraded to XP yet?

And how many are still running Windows 98 or 95?

Windows 2008?

Where is it!? They need to take out the core of Vista, use it in the standard Explorer (maybe a new 08 theme, but no Aero), and market it to businesses. Like they did when ME and 2000 coexisted. They pushed ME, even though there was the better 2000 alternative.

Meaningless stastistic.

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 UK companies have 5+ year old computer? What percentage have a Mac?

(Shrug) Doesn't sound like a low number to me.

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?

Poorly-worded article summary

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.

Upgrades

Over here, the heads of IT, marketing, and managing director (me) all agree that going to Vista is a downgrade* not an upgrade, so the systems now dual boot with Windows XP and Linux**. Microsoft can shove Vista where the sun doesn't shine.

* Having "played" with Vista on another persons new machine and decent spec, it's terrible.
** After learning about Linux from scratch.

So most companies...

will slowly roll out a new desktop OS, this isn't news.

Are they really surprised?

To run Vista, businesses will need new machines (that is, if they bought the current machines for XP) with higher spec, they costs money.
Also you have to roll it out, which costs money
Also you have to buy the Vista itself, which costs a lot of money
You have to make sure your apps run, if not fix them, which costs money.
You have to take support calls for those who can't use Vista, which costs money.

All this, for a differant UI (some argue better, I disagree).

vista

When i read these stories, I have a pretty different view here: this is great news for Microsoft. They continue to have record quarters in terms of revenue and the upside for Vista is just starting. No matter what they say, organizations will eventually move from XP to Vista (and nothing else). It will take a long time just like 2000 to XP. My comments have nothing to do with my feelings about Vista usability etc. I use both a MacBook [personafile.com] and a Vista desktop (at work)... I prefer the Mac (don't we all?).

Vista's going to be interesting.

Service Pack 1 is due pretty soon for Vista, which is going to get more companies looking at it. However, there's a bigger problem. Although it's nicer looking, it doesn't have a whole lot to offer "enterprise" level customers.

There's some stuff I really like about Vista. I like the ability to allow old apps to virtualize access to the one or two directories or reg keys they need to access. The old "manual hunt with RegMon" fix method, as any desktop support person knows, is the most annoying thing about running an XP system as a non-admin. I also like the better device support.

The downsides are there too though...the UI is a huge performance penalty, even with Aero shut off. Most businesses are not going to want to go out and buy RAM for current desktops or junk the older desktops just because they want to roll out Vista. Plus, a lot of early adopters got burned with some of the file transfer speed and network bugs.

Truth is, Vista is not a slam-dunk upgrade. 2000 vs. NT was. Even XP vs. 2000 was, depending on who you ask. The problem this time around is that there's a new user interface, and a huge hardware hurdle to jump. I think Microsoft is going to have a ton of XP holdouts on their hands in the next few years, much longer than they expected. (The place I used to work was an NT holdout until last year.)

Build a worse mousetrap...

...and they'll stay away in droves.

In Related News, Linux and Mac up in UK

We have choices, and WinVista is as wise as choice as WinME was.

56 percent over two years is bad??

"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."

I know the article is meant to be negative, but 56% over the next two years is a LOT.

I know a company that's upgrading...

...but not from xp to vista, their going from 98 to xp.

All the software that the hospital my dad works for uses for their bookkeeping and accounting is all DOS legacy stuff. Only now, 5 years after xp came out, are they finally upgrading.

A Ballmer first

i think that's the first intelligent thing I've ever heard come out of Steve Ballmer's mouth... wait, was that Steve or maybe some other Ballmer at MS?

Anyways... if only they'd apply that same philosophy to their marketing and product development cycles... ie: instead of promising the world in a big new release, they should maybe announce and release a new set of Features every year or so and give the product a new name or something only when a major UI change has occurred... they could even charge for them!!!??? hmmm sounds familiar (www.apple.com)

I Speak Corporatese

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".

Translation: "Oh fuck. Oh FUCK. Oh fuck oh fuck OH FUCK! We were riding on this being bigger than Jesus^H^H^H^H^H XP and no one's taking! Even our OEM monopoly isn't working! WE'RE GOING TO LOSE THE FUCKING HUGE PROFITS! OUR GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN PROFIT IS BEING ABRIDGED! *the sky darkens with a cascade of office chairs*

...I, for one, can't exactly say I feel sympathetic. And I hope Ballmer's spoiled, egotistical, megalomaniacal, borderline-psychopathic heart bursts in his chest during one of his little temper tantrums. What are you gonna do now Steve, "fucking kill" all the evil people who aren't buying this polished turd of a DRM-fest you have the balls to call an OS?

Ummmm, no...

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.

Ummmm,no, that means 18% will have upgraded to Windows Vista within 24 months. That's what the data said, and you don't add percentages together when they are all coming out of the same pool. If 18% are upgrading in the next 24 months, then that's how many are upgrading. Micro$oft would love it if 56% were upgrading, but they're not!

So, to review for the slower folks in the audience: 2% of 100% have upgraded, 6.5% of 100% will upgrade in 6 months, 12.6% of 100% in 12 months, 13% of 100% in 18 months, and a GRAND TOTAL of 18% of 100% will have upgraded in 24 months. If that's not correct then someone is misrepresenting their data!