BURLY MICROSOFT has snatched a leading UK market share for Vista, its flagging operating system, since it decreed that PC vendors were not allowed to ship versions of its old XP software with their machines.

Business versions of Vista outsold equivalent versions of XP for the first time in May this year, according to actual sales figures collated by market research firm Context.

"The main reason" for Vista's May breakthrough, said Marie-Christine Pigott, operating systems analyst at Context, "was the Microsoft deadline".

Microsoft had decreed that vendors wouldn't be allowed to ship XP after 30 June, even though customers clearly preferred it to the much maligned Vista. Context's numbers show that for almost 18 months after Microsoft launched its multi-billion Vista, business customers still preferred the old XP.

Vendors would have prepared for the deadline by dropping XP early, said Pigott. But the IT trade was reporting that businesses had since realised Vista wasn't so bad after all, even though they had to buy more powerful machines to run it.

"I wouldn't say that people like Vista now, but they accept it. And they haven't really got a choice," said Pigott.

The software business manager of a UK distributor, who preferred not to be named, confirmed that manufacturers brought Vista in before the deadline. Sales of Vista had crept up over the preceding year, since customers were offered the option of downgrading to XP if they thought Vista wasn't any good.

XP Professional was installed on 65 per cent of all machines sold through UK distribution (about 80 per cent of the UK market) in January 2007, the month Vista was launched, according to Context's aggregation of actual UK sales data. A year later, XP was still outselling Vista business versions by nearly 10 points. Until then, Vista's market share had relied heavily on sales of home versions.

It is tempting to pillory the convicted software monopolist for spending billions of dollars producing a damp squib. But these figures show that Microsoft has reached a significant milestone in the inevitable rise of Vista as the dominant desktop operating system.

In June, Vista held 69 per cent of the distribution market. Including sales of XP, Microsoft holds a 92.8 market share. Microsoft (in a written statement) said it stands to reason that it would take a while for its latest release to catch on. Businesses follow long buying cycles, and a new o/s is not something they rush into. XP was still being installed on a quarter of all machines sold in June, before the Microsoft's deadline.

Still, the cracks are showing. In January 2007 when Vista was launched, Microsoft had a higher market share than it has now, 18 months later. It had 94.4 per cent of the distribution market and has since lost one and a half points of a market it virtually owns: the distribution business model has been built on sweeteners known as vendor marketing funds - Linux, the only viable alternative to a Microsoft PC operating system, cannot compete on Microsoft's corporate terms. Yet it has made inroads into Microsoft's distribution heartland since the launch of the budget-price Eee PC, which has Linux preloaded. µ

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