Vista uptake is barely more than Windows 98 share

And the biggest reason for this IMO? Requirements. If I'm buying 40 PCs for work, I can get systems with low end Core 2 Duos, 1GB of RAM and XP and they'll sprint along quite happily. If I put Vista on with only 1GB of RAM, the PCs would take a very noticeable performance hit - to say nothing about some of our programs which may not work with it. To get PCs which would work happily with Vista would cost me more. And when multiplied over 40+ PCs, the cost adds up.

Companies stick with what works. That's why my previous employer last year had only just begun to roll out XP. 2K was stable for them and ran everything they wanted whilst being undemanding on hardware. If XP works fine then most companies will look at Vista's poorer compatibility and higher requirements and will decide it's not worth bothering with.

And quite understandably too. I have no plans at all where I work to start pushing it out. XP does everything I want, is reliable and doesn't demand powerful hardware to run at a decent speed.

Interesting, using Google anal-itiks i get the following: -

From my PC mutiplayer gaming utility site: -
1. XP 84.28% 
2. Vista 11.14%
3. 2000 2.23%
4. Server 2003 1.76%
5. 98 0.59%

From my IT Services business website: -
1. XP 76.36% 
2. 2000 13.64%
3. Vista 5.45%
4. Server 2003 3.64%
5. 98 0.91%


Comes as no surprise that gamers are early adopters. They tend to be a bit sheeplike and think new=good - in spite of history proving otherwise!

That share report does not surprise me

Vista sucks and the people using it are mostly some Gaming extremists for its DX10 support

And thats the point...
The only thing concerning me about Vista is DX10 (which again is nothing revolutionary)

anything else with that OS is just waste of space

just port DX10 to Windows XP 
Stupid Microsoft

Vista does not bring any significant advantage for business users (or even for home...).
The shiny new user interface is not seen as a strong buying argument and, more importantly, IT divisions hate (and rightly so) software dissemination - they rather support one OS than 2. So, it is really not surprising. As XP is already installed and - ho and behld - it gets the job done...

Vista is entering the corporations through the preinstalled Vista laptops - at least in smaller companies, as bigger ones tend to use their own software images from SA contracts with MS.

Personally I think MS should have sold Vista as a 64bit only OS (with a 32 bit "legacy" version). No, it wouldn't sell any better but it would create the perception of a "more advanced OS" instead of a "bloated and buggy OS". Yes, it would be essentially marketing speech but sometimes it seems to be what is needed...



"The Ow! is now" is certainly the more appropriate marketing pitch for all of this.

We have a handfull of nationwide representatives for our company, and recently I have downgraded Vista laptops to XP for 3 of them - the machine was simply crunching numbers all day long and nothing was being done... that and I was sick to death of the security alerts. 

We have now bought in a dozen XP licences so our new-build workstations are Vista free for at the least the next year or 2 (based on 1 new build every 2 months). 

As for the slug that is now Office... it seems all too late.

... when even your most technophobic friends ask you if Vista is as bad as they've heard!

My company has more machines running 98 than we have running Vista. The 98 machines are running a very old application that doesn't work well on anything else.

The Vista machine was a trial machine. It had the lowest performance on our applications of any OS. I think it was due to a (now patched) network bug, but it failed to impress us. We're still requiring all new machine to be XP until Jan 2008 when we'll review again.

I have been a computer technician for 8 years now and worked on countless machines and operating systems. Vista is both, more secure and useer friendly if people take the time to learn about it before judging it. The main reason that Vista is not as popular as XP is that it is much more secure than XP. To this date, XP Professional is the MOST pirated software ever, ranging from over 65 % of all XP machines having pirated copies of XP on them. No wonder people want XP, and no wonder that Microsoft wants to phase XP out. It has nothing to do with Vistas capabilities as I was a pre-tester and I now own two Vista licenses on both of my computers and Vista has been the most stable and secure operating system yet. The people that are badmouthing Vista are the uneducated and the freeloaders.

Okay, not to go whinging here, but I am a rabid gamer, and I have the Core 2 Quadro, terabyte disk space and 8800 GTS to prove it. Not to mention the 200+ games I legally own.
Thing is, I've had a lot of discussions with my fellow gaming friends, and after a lot of screenshot comparing, a lot of benchmark reading and a lot of DX10 eye candy oogling, well my friends and I all agree that Vista isn't worth a doink for the poor DX10 difference that we are offered at this point in time.
As it is today, DX10 is only used as a enhanced shader thingy, with its most obvious implementation being bigger and more complex explosions. Gee, wow, count me unimpressed.
Given the abysmally dismal performance of a Vista machine compared to a same-spec XP machine on the same game, you'd have to be brain-dead to want to game on Vista just to have more particles in your explosions.
The morons that do so are welcome to their snail-paced fps and slideshow graphics. I prefer to blaze right past them on my perfectly fluid XP box.
Oh, I will be getting the next-gen graphics board to be sure, I am stupid that way, but if I pay top dollar for an outrageously-priced piece of hardware, it had damn well better get my rig screaming along even more.
My target is fps, anything that bogs me down is out of the question. And Vista is a bog of Siberian proportions.
My friends all agree. None of us run Vista. And I think the market is going to uphold that. As of yet, I have yet to hear of a non-Microsoft game that is DX10 only.
The game makers aren't stupid. Microsoft can afford (for the moment) to lose sales by forcing people to the new OS, other game developer shops have to have as many sales as they can get.
And today, and probably most of next year, that means DX9 is still on the cards.
And I'll be avoiding XP SP3 until I see the benchmarks as well. Never trust The Beast.

I've been using Vista Ultimate as a workstation for 3 or 4 months now. I never spent much time with XP in a professional environment. I used Windows 2000 for years as a workstation, then forced myself to move to Vista so I could become familiar with the interface before my corporation adopted it for all computers. 

I'm a network & sysadmin. I'm used to figuring out problems. I'm also (unfortunately) used to routine mindless tasks. Windows 2000's interface was mostly clean. It was quick. 2000 doesn't have some of the nifty logging or features that XP or Vista have; but you could get access to something with one or two mouse clicks, tweak it, and close the window without even reading the forms that were displayed. (XP is pretty good about this in most areas). But in Vista I have to dig. And dig. And dig. Almost nothing is within easy reach. Ever try to change your IP address in Vista? (I rest my case.)

When they say they designed this for business users, exactly who did the GUI team interview? End users? End users playing at admin? Or experienced admins?

Where I work we're thinking of skipping Vista alltogether, business came preinstalled on a few of the newer laptops we bought and was quickly replaced with XP.
My experience with Vista so far comes from friends asking me to fix their PCs after they've "upgraded" against my advice and suddenly find their sound cards and printers wont work properly/anymore and that half their apps are broken.
It's like a flashy, slow XP that doesnt work properly.

This news item makes no sense whatsoever, and the comments thus far offer no insight either. Here's mine:

1) the stats come from a security company. We've known for a while that vista makes such companies useless (they've been complaining for the past year about it), so is it really any surprise that vista users don't visit their site? 

2) search the homepage of the website, and you won't find the word "vista". You'll find their spotlight on an XP firewall, which makes sense because you need an external firewall for XP, and don't for Vista. 

Question for everyone: how many linux/OSX "business" users go to the sunbelt website? It's a rhetorical question, as we all know that it makes no sense for these users to visit a website that offers them no help -- just like they don't help Vista users!

--
The REAL Message of the article: security companies are crying like little babies and upset that Vista is driving them out of business. Good riddance!

--
I have to wonder whether the name Egan Orion is just an alias for Charlie Demerjian

I only see a few fundamental things, from the point of view of an enterprise. First and foremost the 64bit standard. Second the AES and SHA-1 in the IPSEC implementation. Maybe the IPv6 stock. The 64bit and IPv6 are available as Beta in XP, and the AES is not just as a marketing ploy (I ignore if SP3 makes it available). I simply don't see a reason to upgrade besides that.

You guys really are missing a trick. It's fecking obvious that Vista runs okay and does most stuff that most people want, if they aren't glued like super-knob-heads to a looped benchmark app. 

The more you flame the basic functionality, the more you lose any kind of cred leverage, because it can be easily debunked.

What would be really useful would be more people crying blue bloody murder over the really scandalous stuff. DRM, service overload and lack of visibility in it's inner workings - all legit complaints.

Stop bitching on about performance, it's wasted argument and it's causing enough smoke to obscure the really fucking important stuff i.e. Big Vole looking over your shoulder 24/7.


I personally purchased a PC in Jan 2007 with WIN XP Home, in order to avoid getting and paying for a PC with Vista on it.

i've held off on vista deployment in our 400 odd people company, except for laptops. silly just to dismiss it.

Offline files is much improved (no user interaction)
Searching and file management is improved
gaming performance is poorer but getting there thanks to recent updates (lost planet and bioshock are actually faster on my pc than dx9 and look better)
fast user switching on domains has been useful
the new deployment tools allow single hardware independent images

we'll probably look at vista in future the same way as we looked at xp before sp2, particularly when we've all got quad core cpu's and 4gb ram.



The numbers shown by CounterSpy are going to be a reflection of two things:

1) operating system usage
2) fraction of people perceiving their operating system to be insecure and need anti-spyware

So let's put a different spin on this one.

(82.91/83.90) 98.9% of users doing research and running Windows XP think their OS is insecure

(14.88/3.59) 414% of users doing research and running Windows 2000 think their OS is insecure (errr...most people with Win2K don't even bother with the research, they just buy anti-spyware flat out)

(0.32/9.38) 3.4% of users doing research and running Windows Vista think their OS is insecure 

Hmm. Maybe those people are all up to something?

About 70 million Vista sold and over 900 million windows oses in use can't give Vista 0,32% market share. Of course it depends on who you ask but it is easy to calculate the correct number using Windows market share, number of Windowses and number of sold Vistas.

I don't understand why Microsoft has not figured out that the os development has changed drastically with the internet.Its no longer about monolithic releases, its about updates. More like a open source model, even apple does that. In apple theres 10.1-10.4 and its about incremental improvements. It seemed for a while that they learned that lesson with sp2. With so many internet connections on idle, it just makes sense. Of course this also means that the teething stage of os development and user adoption is practically nullified.
But then again they are the experts.

I built my own computer and first and foremost the problem for me is Vista's price, eep! I spend 90% of my computer time gaming and there would have to be a BIG advantage to my gaming experience for my to plunk down all that money for Vista. From what I read on the gaming forums Vista would lower my system performance significanlty. I'd have to do a hardware upgrade just to get back to the same performance I have under XP.

I purchased a spare hard drive for my laptop to install Windows MEII (vista) on it, leaving the original with XP clean. Only reason I got MEII, ( and I was one of the beta testers) was for when the poor shmucks buy a new computer with MEII on it. I will be familiar with the OS. 
Allot of my normal software won't work on MEII. True, some is old and the companies no longer in business, but different versions/programs don't work as good as what I have. 
Purchased a T-brand laptop for work that only came with MEII. The testing program we use won't run on MEII. Reformatted the hard drive and upgraded to XP. The test program works, but I have spent over two weeks and hundreds of driver tests to get the laptop working. The only device I can't get to work is the wireless. The T brand refuses to suppport XP on any new laptop sold. So, go with the H brand or the D brand, as both offer XP upgrade discs, (they call it downgrade discs).
At one point, I was able to get the beta of MEII to share files on my network. The retail version, all I can share is the "public" folder. 
The eye candy looks good, but it's not worth the headaches that come with MEII.

@Andy B: bizarre definition of security! So the main benefit of Vista to you is that it safeguards MS's obscene revenue stream? Oh, I guess you might also be obliquely referring to the mind-numbing succession of UACs that effectively allow MS to waive responsibility for any security grief the dumb user gets himself into. Well, if that's what floats your boat, why not just accept the WGA patches onto XP, and get revenue protection, but with reasonable performance and full driver support? Sheesh!