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Vista: Companies slow on the uptake - poll
Redmond shouldn't crack open the champagne just yet...

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Wednesday 06 December 2006

The sound of popping champagne corks may still be reverberating in Steve Ballmer's ears, after last week's Vista launch bash, but Microsoft shouldn't start celebrating sending the latest iteration of Windows into the corporate sphere too quickly.

Despite all the hype and razzmatazz surrounding Vista, a poll of silicon.com readers has found most businesses are certainly not planning to adopt the OS overnight.

The majority (40 per cent) of poll respondents, when asked when their company will move to using Microsoft's Vista, said they would wait until they are confident Microsoft has ironed out enough bugs - however long that takes. A further 25 per cent of readers said they would be waiting "until 2009, if at all" to upgrade to Vista.

But a worrying - for Redmond - 14 per cent of respondents said they would "never" adopt Vista.

A recent Forrester survey of IT chiefs at European businesses found that more than half of European organisations have no plan to upgrade to Vista. A poll of silicon.com's CIO Jury IT user panel also suggests caution is the name of the game. Only one of the 12 CIO Jury members said he planned to upgrade within the first year of Vista's release, while half said they are looking at a one- to two-year upgrade timeframe and the rest are set to wait two to three years.

A speedy upgrade to Vista is a minority concern, it would seem. In the silicon.com reader poll, seven per cent said they plan to upgrade "as soon as possible", eight per cent said they would adopt Vista "within six months" and six per cent plan the move "within a year".

One early adopter of Vista is the London Borough of Newham, which said at the UK launch of the operating system it is looking to improve security, reduce energy costs and promote flexible working with the operating system.

Speaking at the New York launch of Vista last week, a bullish Ballmer - Microsoft's CEO - played down the notion that companies won't be falling over themselves to adopt the latest version of Windows. "We've built the highest-quality operating system we possibly can. We have many customers who are anxious to deploy. We will have a stronger, faster upgrade cycle for Vista than for Windows XP," he said.