Windows Vista take-up crawls at snail's pace

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is taking a while to catch on, with just 6.3 per cent of enterprise users on the OS by the end of 2007.

And according to research by Forrester Research, most upgrades were from users of Windows 2000 - which lost around six per cent of users - rather than XP, which Vista is intended to replace.

Vista: all the coverage...

1. Windows Vista SP1 finally a go

2. Microsoft slashes Windows Vista price tag

3. Microsoft: 'These programs won't work after Vista SP1…' 4. Some to get Vista SP1 this week

5. Vista SP1 finally ready for manufacture

6. Do US businesses want Vista at last?

7. Microsoft refreshes Vista SP1

8. Don't put Vista in schools, says education agency

9. Details of Vista SP1 revealed

10. Vista: Piracy rates half the level of XP, says Microsoft

Around a quarter of enterprises plan to upgrade to Vista in 2008 although Forrester said companies may change plans and wait for the release of Windows 7 - pencilled in for the second half of 2009.

Adoption of Microsoft's latest browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has also been sluggish with just 30 per cent of enterprise users on it 15 months after its launch.

Slightly more than 70 per cent of those surveyed were still using IE6 at the end of last year, despite the imminent arrival of a beta version of IE8.

In contrast, Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 virtually replaced Firefox 1.5 the same period after its release.

The proportion of users on Firefox actually doubled during 2007, with 18 per cent using it at the end of the year. The proportion of users on all versions of IE fell by 10 per cent.

The survey quizzed more than 50,000 users from 2,300 large enterprises over the course of 2007.