Just 5% of business PCs to deploy Vista in 2007: Forrester

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 05 December 2006 08:22

Your IT - Home IT

Approximately 5 million new US business PCs will run vista by the end of 2007, according to a new report by research group Forrester. This is just a fraction of the new PCs that will be replaced.

Forrester estimates that there are 95 million business PCs in use in the US today, and approximately 20 million will be retired in 2007.

According to Forrester, the vast majority of retired business PCs will be replaced with new Windows XP-based machines — not Windows Vista-based ones.

Forrester believes that because roughly two-thirds of business PCs today run Windows XP, with the remaining Windows 2000 and Windows 95/98/ME machines still waiting for an upgrade, there's no real hurry for most businesses to deploy Windows Vista.

Forrester claims that IT operations professionals would rather standardize on a single, stable operating system that meets most of their end user requirements before introducing Vista. Thus, Forrester predicts just 25% of new US business PCs will be upgraded to Windows Vista in 2007.

With US businesses renowned for being aggressive early adopters of technology, the outlook for the pace of adoption of Vista by businesses in markets outside the US does not appear to be bright in the coming year.