Vista - businesses not convinced

Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 per cent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the OS, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging.

A survey of 961 independently selected IT professionals found 90 per cent still have concerns about the migration to Vista and 48 per cent have not yet deployed Vista in any way. Forty-four per cent said they are "considering" alternative operating systems - mostly Mac OS X, Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux and Ubuntu.

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But analyst Clive Longbottom of Quocirca advised caution when interpreting the figures. "Very few places are looking at Linux as a replacement for Microsoft," he said.

Longbottom disputes the widely held belief that users will find it easier to upgrade to Linux than to adapt to Vista's new GUI. "It does take a bit of time to find things on Vista but most people do the majority of the transfer themselves and require less than an hour's worth of training," he said. And, while Linux might be free, there could be a lot of effort involved in transferring things like Word and Excel macros, he warned.

Longbottom said: "Microsoft's big problem is not Linux but the difficulty of upgrading desktops to Vista. Old hardware has to be checked, so Vista is a new-build, new-install solution."

Many users are waiting to see if Vista Service Pack 1 improves the situation, Longbottom said, and are worried about software compatibility. "Microsoft has done a very bad job of getting people to sign up to say their software is compatible with Vista."

Early results from the Linux Foundation's annual survey of Linux use indicate that, in those businesses and organisations that have deployed Linux desktops, just under 40 per cent are running Linux on more than half of their machines. And, in most of these places, Linux is more common on desktops than servers - apparently contradicting the common belief that Linux is, and will continue to be, mainly a server OS.

Again though, Longbottom sounds a note of caution. Citing hard usage data of OS' used to access popular websites, he said: "It's still less than one per cent, after 15 years of Linux at the desktop - that's less than Vista has achieved in one year."

Peter Judge writes for ZDNet.co.uk