How Windows Vista is turning people to Linux

David M Williams
Thursday, 28 August 2008 04:09

Opinion and Analysis

Firstly, Google it for yourself. Consult the all-knowing Google oracle “What is the uptake of Windows Vista?” and while it won’t give you any hard numbers it’s certainly not short of a consistent message.

“Vista uptake is barely than Windows ’98 share. Less than 1 percent in businesses.” Says the Inquirer. “Amid disappointing Vista uptake, Microsoft relents on XP execution,” proclaims Arstechnica. It goes on and on, the message unrelenting it its uniformity. “Vista – business uptake still slow,” and “Very little enterprise-wide uptake of Vista,” reads two more news sites.

Things aren’t all doom and gloom; the business end of town sure haven’t been flocking to where the wow starts now but we have a different story with your regular home market, the kind of people who go to a department store and ask the 15 year old sales assistant for advice.
Here, IDC predict 90% Vista Home uptake. The first year’s consumer uptake of Vista surpassed the enterprise uptake. Similarly, Dataquest find that Windows Vista uptake is largest on new home computers.

Really, that’s not surprising. These results don’t imply that consumers were chafing at the bit to go buy Vista the second it was released. Perhaps some did, but I’d certainly consider it a safe bet that this trend really boils down to two simple things: (1) over the course of a year a lot of people will have purchased a brand new computer from a store, and (2) most all brand-name store-bought computers will come with Windows Vista loaded and enabled by default. So there’s a large percentage of the home market uptake accounted for.

This has two ramifications: enterprises, in the large, are choosing not to migrate existing infrastructure to Windows Vista and, if you think about it, enterprises are similarly choosing not to receive Windows Vista on their newly purchased computers. This was the finding of the Gartner Group who said last year the bulk of businesses will opt for Windows XP over Vista or, if they get stuck with Vista, they’ll still downgrade it to XP. Likewise, Forrester research found that Vista uptake was at the low, low rate of a paltry 2%.

Even as recently as June 26 this year the world’s largest chipmaker, Intel, said they have no plans to roll out Windows Vista despite being in the middle of a refresh cycle of the organisation’s hardware fleet.

It’s clear, Windows Vista is a dud. Yes, periodically you will hear from someone who says that Windows Vista works perfectly for them and they don’t understand the fuss – but this is the minority view. There’s no need to count as high as six degrees of separation here; everyone knows someone directly who has tried Vista and is exasperated by it – or that person is themself.

After all the hype of Longhorn and how revolutionary it would be, after all the waiting, Windows Vista has gone off with a whimper, not a bang, and is being actively rejected.

And here’s where Linux comes in.

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