Microsoft wants nothing else with Windows Vista than to out perform the deployment of Windows XP in the business environment. But the margin of success by which they mean to do it has raised some eyebrows. No less than 2 to 1 in the first year. This means that Microsoft aims to deploy Windows Vista on 20% of enterprise machines in just 12 months since the official launch. This while Windows XP has found its way onto only 10% of business desktops by the second year since its release.

In this context, there is a consensus among survey and polls illustrating the deployment of Windows Vista, all of them pointing in the vicinity of 20% adoption within the first 12 months.

According to the figures released by Silicon.com, approximately 18% of enterprises will deploy Windows Vista within the first year. Market analyst Gartner proposed the figure of 26.2% adoption at the end of two years.

"Then there's the poll from CDW Corp which says that 20% IT decision makers will be moving to Vista within the next year. They also are saying that many businesses will have to upgrade their hardware in order to run Vista. Vista's minimum required spec is 512MB of Ram, an 800Mhz processor and a DirectX 9 capable graphics card - not exactly a modern spec (the Pentium III ran at 933Mhz and came out in 1999). On the minimum Vista spec they will not be able to run Aero but they will be getting features core to business needs like better security, easier manageability and search etc. So I would question how many businesses would actually need to upgrade... perhaps there would be some driver updates - which would come down via Windows Update," revealed James Senior Partner Technical Specialist on Views on Vista.