Vista Adoption Rate Predicted to Outpace Windows XP
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Expected to be fastest-moving operating system ever, analyst says.
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More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld?s ?Save XP? petition in the three weeks since it was launched ? many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change. On June 30, Microsoft plans to stop making new licenses to Windows XP available through most outlets, though business users and some consumers will be able to ?downgrade? to XP after that date under certain circumstances. InfoWorld expects to present the petition to Microsoft when it has collected 100,000 signatures.[ Follow all the coverage of and reader reaction to the ?Save XP? campaign. ]Although InfoWorld?s campaign has given a voice to users who prefer to keep the familiar XP, concerns over Vista had been bubbling since its release a year ago. That has been evident not only anecdotally in comments that InfoWorld editors have heard from IT staff and users alike, but also in the slow adoption of Vista in the marketplace.While millions of people have gotten Vista with a new PC, most did not have a choice of what OS was loaded on it, since retailers stopped selling new XP computers in spring 2007 and online sellers (with the recent exception of Dell) made XP available only to business customers.Where people have had a choice, Vista has not been it. Microsoft has reported that it sold 100 million Vista licenses in 2007, which means that roughly four out of 10 new machines shipped with Vista on them. By comparison, nearly 70 percent of PCs shipped with XP in its first year. According to NetApplications, about 11 percent of installed machines use Vista, compared to 75 percent running XP.IT consultant Dimension Data Americas has yet to have any of its midsize business customers convert to Vista, said Jeff Dimock, its vice president of Microsoft solutions ? though he noted that several are working on plans to do so. ?The mid-market has not been upgrading to Vista,? said Karen Hayward, executive vice president at IT outsourcing firm CenterBeam, which provisions OS and other apps to midsize businesses.Compatibility issues and lack of perceived value are the major reasons that businesses and users have avoided Vista. Research firm Gartner advises its clients not to switch to Vista until early 2009, after the first service pack has been released, third-party compatibility is improved, and more Vista-ready hardware is in the hardware purchase cycle, says Michael Silver, a research vice president at Gartner.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's wish that consumers purchase the premium versions of Windows Vista rather than the most basic version of the OS may be coming true, according to the findings of a research report released Thursday. Research from Current Analysis for the week ending Feb. 3, which covers the first five days Vista was available to U.S. retail customers, shows that sales of PCs with Vista Home Premium preinstalled comprised 70 percent of PC unit sales in the U.S. retail market, while sales of PCs with Vista Home Basic accounted for 22 percent. Windows Vista was released to consumers on Jan. 30. However, sales of PCs with the most full-featured and expensive consumer version of Vista, Windows Vista Ultimate, were lackluster in the first week, accounting for a mere 1.2 percent of PC sales. However, Samir Bhavnani, the Current Analysis research director who wrote the report, said he expects this will eventually change. "You can expect over time that Ultimate will become a bigger part of the overall mix," he said. The release of Vista boosted overall PC sales, giving the PC market the best week it's had in four years, Bhavnani said. PC unit retail sales increased 173 percent for the week ending Feb. 3 compared to the previous week, and were up 67 percent year over year, according to the report. And the increase occurred at a time when retailers weren't even promoting Vista to customers as much as they were promoting another consumer product, he said. "Most of the retailers last week were focused on selling HDTVs because of the Super Bowl," he said. This week, Vista has been more top of mind with retailers, so he said the strength of PC sales during Vista's first week should be sustained over its second week of release. Still, if Microsoft had gotten Vista to market before the busy holiday shopping season in November and December as originally planned, Vista would have had an even more impressive launch, Bhavnani said. Out of the PC vendors selling hardware that supports Vista, Hewlett-Packard fared the best in the first week, according to the report. HP accounted for a 54 percent share of Vista Home Premium sales and a 53 percent share of Vista Home Basic unit sales. The week prior to the introduction of Vista, which ended Jan. 27, HP computers represented 33 percent of all PC sales. As for the long-term sustainability of Vista PC sales, that remains to be seen, Bhavnani said. "We won't know the answer to the question until we look at the first half of this year relative to the first half of the year last year," he said.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on  Thursday that more than 200 million users will be using one of  its new products -- including its highly-anticipated Windows  Vista operating system, Office 2007 software suite and Exchange  server -- by the end of 2007.
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Redmond sees Windows Vista as a big step up over XP for photographers, but it's adding more image-management options through Windows Live Photo Gallery.
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Despite underwhelming consumers and being&#160;snubbed by enterprises,&#160;Windows Vista&#39;s numbers keep growing, with Microsoft&#160; saying Thursday that it has now shipped 88 million copies of the operating system, almost double the number of copies of XP in the same amount of time at its launch.In late July, Microsoft said it had hit the&#160;60 million shipment mark with Vista.Microsoft had previously said that it had&#160;shipped 20 million copies of Vista&#160;in its first month and 40 million copies of Vista in the first 100 days.Microsoft credited Vista with helping it&#160;beat Wall Street expectations&#160;and raise financial projections for the rest of the year. The company reported revenue of $13.76 billion for the first quarter ended Sept. 30, up 27 percent from the same quarter in 2006.Revenue in its client segment, which includes all consumer versions of Windows, was $4.14 billion, edging out the $4.11 billion in revenue from the Microsoft Business Division where Office is produced.CFO Chris Liddell credited strong sales in emerging markets, due in part to anti-piracy and legalization programs there.Client revenues, however, did not top those of the first calendar quarter this year, when Vista was officially launched. Revenues at that time were $5.32 billion.Three-quarters of the copies sold of Vista were higher-priced &#39;premium&#39; versions, compared to 59 percent of the copies of Windows -- primarily XP -- available a year ago.The 88 million figure mostly includes Vista-installed PCs bought by consumers and small businesses, as well as packaged copies of Vista sold in stores or online.It does exclude the tens of millions of Windows corporate volume licenses. There, many enterprises continue to hold off on deploying Vista, acknowledged CFO Chris Liddell, though he expects them to start deploying it when Vista Service Pack 1&#39;s arrival in the first quarter of next year.Nevertheless, revenue from companies renewing their volume licenses for Windows, which gives them the right to upgrade to Vista, was up 27 percent.Other highlights from the statistics:-- Unit sales of Windows Server&#39;s premium enterprise edition were up 35 percent year-over-year;-- A release candidate for Windows Server 2008 has been downloaded more than one million times in its first month;-- Unit and revenue growth of SQL Server were both up more than 15 percent;-- Halo 3 generated $330 million in revenue;-- Xbox 360 console unit sales increased 90 percent, driven by a price cut in August and Halo 3-related demand;-- Client revenues, including those for Vista, are expected to grow 62-64 percent year-over-year in the current fiscal Q2, or 13-14 percent excluding certain revenue deferrals in the prior year;-- Microsoft Business Division revenues, including those for Office, are expected to grow 15-16 percent in Q2 after normalizing for impact of technology guarantees and pre-shipment deferrals in the prior year;-- A beta version of Office Communications Server has been downloaded 80,000 times;-- There are 10,000 customers in the Customer Technical Preview (CTP) program for PerformancePoint Server, its new business intelligence offering.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Microsoft Corp.  launched Windows Vista for businesses on Thursday and said that by the end of next year more than 200 million people would use the new version of its dominant operating system or new office software and server computer products.
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Statistics released today by market research firm Net Applications show that Windows Vista hasn't even licked its nine-year old ancestor, Windows 98.
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Resistance to Vista was expected among the large companies that have leverage with large PC vendors, but even in the consumer and SMB ranks, the clamor for XP is significant. The beneficiaries? Possibly, "white-box" system builders and direct-sales channels.
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Microsoft may have pushed a too-aggressive XP transition schedule because of how long it took to release Vista, an analyst suggests.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft released details of a study it commissioned that found that total cost of ownership for Windows Vista on mobile PCs is $605 less annually than Windows XP. According to research conducted by Wipro and GCR Custom Research and released Wednesday, total cost of ownership for Windows XP is $4,407 annually, while Vista's cost is $3,802. The $4,407 figure was derived from costs of hardware, software, IT labor, and user costs. Mobile PCs were the focus because these units will outship desktop systems by 2010, said Hiroshi Sakakibara, product manager for Windows Product Management at Microsoft. Peculiarly, the study actually was based on XP usage and extrapolations based on Vista capabilities because there was not a substantial base of Vista clients in use yet when the study was done early in 2007. Now, the installed base of Vista is 60 million PCs, Microsoft said. GCR and Wipro calculated that the Vista upgrade itself saves $251 per year. These benefits include enhancements in security, desktop engineering, service desk requirements, user labor, and hardware and software benefits. Among the improvements noted were in such areas as network diagnostics, backup and restore, self-healing functions, and implementation of security policies. Deploying best practices through Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization model adds another $236 in Vista savings, while utilizing the MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) saves $118 per PC. MDOP features Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization and the Microsoft Asset Inventory Service, while Infrastructure Optimization covers best practices, such as controlling PC configurations. MDOP is available as part of Microsoft's Software Assurance licensing program. Reducing vulnerabilities and utilizing security policies presents savings, noted Bill Barna, principal consultant at Wipro. Security savings alone were estimated at $55. "If you can reduce the number of core vulnerabilities, you can basically have the savings flow throughout the entire security model," Barna said. The survey featured 541 phones calls to users at 131 XP user organizations; one IT decision-maker and three end-users were polled at each user site. While Microsoft is promoting Vista upgrades, a Free Software Foundation project called "BadVista," is pushing free software as an alternative. "We describe it as a campaign definitely against Vista but chiefly to promote free software over Vista," said John Sullivan, a campaign manager at the foundation. Users should replace "proprietary" systems with a free system like GNU-Linux, Sullivan said.
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(InfoWorld) - Windows Vista's share of online users has increased every month this year, while rival Mac OS X -- to which Vista has often been compared -- has shown little, if any, growth, a metrics company reports. According to Net Applications, Windows Vista accounted for 4.52 percent of all systems that browsed the Web in June, up from January's 0.18 percent. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93 percent in February, 2.04 percent in March, 3.02 percent in April and 3.74 percent in May. Apple's Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22 percent in January and hit its high point of 6.46 percent in May, but it slipped back to 6 percent in June. If Vista's uptake trend continues, it should pass Mac OS X in Web usage share by the end of August. Shifts from the Mac OS X running on older PowerPC processors to the edition running on Intel CPUs have been constant, but according to Net Applications' data, the computer maker is not making new Mac converts. In January, for example, the PowerPC version of Mac OS X was reported by 4.34 percent of the machines Net Applications tracked, while the Intel version accounted for just 1.88 percent. June's numbers showed that the PowerPC edition of the operating system still held the lead, but the gap had narrowed considerably: Older versions were pegged at 3.52 percent and Intel editions at 2.48 percent. Likewise, Vista's increases have come at the expense of Windows XP and Windows 2000, both of which have dropped in usage since January. Windows XP, for instance, accounted for 85.02 percent of all machines that month but was down to 81.94 percent in June. Windows overall total has remained flat, ranging between 90.01 percent and 90.46 percent through the first six months of the year. Net Applications' 6 percent share for Mac OS X jibes with recent IDC sales estimates, which put Apple's portion at 5.6 percent of all personal computer sales in the U.S. during the second quarter. Apple's next major upgrade to Mac OS X, dubbed Leopard, is scheduled to ship in October.
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Microsoft&#39;s big Windows patch gets snapped up by consumers, but many businesses are still testing it. By John Foley. Microsoft&#39;s Windows XP Service Pack 2 is now in the hands of more than 100 million users, the company disclosed on Wednesday.
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US reseller urges 'case-by-case' approach Windows Vista appears to be gaining ground among organisations, with small businesses (SMBs) proving particularly keen to adopt the software giant's latest operating system, according to a new report.â¦
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Windows Vista lands in stores Tuesday, more than five years after its predecessor Windows XP debuted. With that much time for Microsoft to rewrite its operating system, you might expect it to be a sharp break from the Windows we've known.
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(InfoWorld) - In the first year of its release, Microsoft Corp. is expecting businesses to adoptÂ Windows Vista twice as fast as any other version of Windows, with 10 times as many Vista business seats deployed at launch than any previous release of the OS. Despite this optimism, analysts still don't expect businesses to begin adopting Vista in earnest until late 2007 or even 2008, with many waiting for the first service pack version of Vista before they begin considering an upgrade. One reason Microsoft is expecting Vista to be so successful is that the company has made a concerted effort to give customers the tools and training they need to adopt Vista across their businesses, said Brad Goldberg, general manager of the Windows Client Business Group at Microsoft. The company also put test versions of the OS into as many people's hands as possible. For the previous Windows migration, to Windows XP, Microsoft didn't release important tools to help businesses upgrade -- such as a compatibility toolkit to ensure existing applications will work -- until Service Pack 2, which was released nine months after Windows XP shipped, he said. However, with Windows Vista, "we made the beta of the [compatibility] toolkit available with Windows Vista Beta 2," Goldberg said. Microsoft also has opened up test versions of the OS to a wide audience, making Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available to the public. Microsoft expects that at least 5 million users will have access to Vista RC1, all of whom the company has encouraged to provide feedback about the release so it can be as polished as possible before it goes out to business customers in November. Another reason Microsoft expects businesses to warm to Vista early is that the company is doing its share to educate customers on how much money they can save by adopting it, Goldberg said. Microsoft has worked with analysts to develop customer case studies to see how much money business customers can save per PC by upgrading to Vista from their current OS. Al Gillen, an analyst with research firm IDC, does not dispute Microsoftâs calculations for the return on investment (ROI) companies will make on Windows Vista, though he says that companies âdonât get the âRâ unless they put in the âIâ first.â âThe ROI story is exciting, but it requires that customers be mature and agile enough to do what they need to do afterwards,â Gillen said. And while Microsoft may meet its ambitious first-year goals for Vista, that momentum will likely peter out, once pent-up demand has been met, Gillen said. âEighteen months out, the adoption curve will look like any other Windows product,â Gillen said. âItâs hard to move corporate customers faster than they are willing to go.â Microsoftâs bullish projections donât appear to jibe with most current third-party customer surveys, such as one online survey of 314 IT professionals conducted by Computerworld in August. Just 17 percent of IT professionals say they are considering rolling out Windows Vista in the first year. Forty-one percent of respondents said they had no plans to roll out Vista, while 35 percent said they would begin testing Vista only after it ships. Of those who said they were considering rolling out Vista in the near or long-term, the largest group (29 percent) said the cost was the biggest determinant of if and when they would upgrade. That was followed by the hardware requirements (16 percent), the amount of employee training (6 percent) and the amount of IT staff retraining (4 percent). Even if Microsoft doesn't meet its goals for Vista, it's not likely to affect the company's revenue. According to one financial analyst firm, Microsoft stands to lose only about $400 million in revenue in fiscal 2008 if Vista business adoption does not go according to the company's plan, and $2 billion in fiscal 2009. In its most recent fiscal year ended June 30, Microsoft reported more than $44 billion in revenue. While the company is optimistic about adoption in its marketing, it is being far more conservative in its financial estimates, analysts said. This is obviously good news for Microsoft, but there is a downside. The longer Vista is available, the more it will cost the company if businesses continue to hold off on adopting the OS. And any negative press or analyst feedback on lackluster Vista adoption could drive Microsoft's stock price down, analysts said. (Eric Lai is a senior writer at Computerworld.)
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By Bill Husted, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  Jan. 28--LET OTHERS SORT OUT FLAWS OF WINDOWS VISTA: It's finally here.   Windows Vista, the long-awaited successor to XP, hits stores on Tuesday.  You'll be hearing a lot about it between now and then.