At the end of the first half of year of Windows Vista general availability Microsoft applauded shipping in excess of 60 million licenses of the operating system. However, the Redmond company was not counting the actual copies of Vista sold to end users or to businesses, or the number of platforms in use across the world. 60 million represent just the Vista licenses sold into the channel, meaning that Microsoft was counting the copies shipped to original equipment manufacturers, system builders, resellers and the dealers in the retail channel.

At the same time, Microsoft advertised the fact that the corporate environment was not as shy to its latest operating system as analysts reported. But while the company pained a positive picture to Vista adoption by enterprises, the actual share of the operating system usage delivers an entirely different tune. At the Financial Analyst Meeting 2007 Microsoft, through the voice of Kevin Turner, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer, boasted that Software assurance customers have in excess of 42 million computers covered for Vista upgrades via volume licensing. And yet, the corporate world is notably slow when it comes to the uptake of Vista, with representative companies such as Intel and Dell postponing migration until after the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

Pedro Bustamante, Senior Research Advisor Panda Security, revealed those statistics put together by the security company in regard to the market share of Windows Vista. "We recently finished a three month research study to discover infection rates on 1,206 medium-sized companies worldwide by performing a malware audit on them. It's interesting to note that Windows Vista is only used in less than 1% of all the workstations audited," Bustamante stated.

In the business environment, Vista accounts for a share of just 0.92%, while Windows XP Professional SP2 is still preferred by far with 65.94%. XP Professional SP2 is followed by Windows 2000 SP4 - 17.93%; Windows Server 2003 SP1- 4.01%; Windows XP Professional SP1- 3.91%; Windows 2000 Server SP4 - 2.46% and Windows Server 2003 SP2 - 2.24%.

These statistics change dramatically when it comes down to the actual number of visitors of the Panda Security official website. Here Windows Vista is runner-up with a share of 5.9%, behind only Windows XP with 86.1%. Windows XP Media Center 2005 - 3.0%; Windows 2000 - 2.2% and Windows 98 - 1.2% are the operating systems featuring a market share of over 1%. In this context it is important to underline the fact that the statistics put together by Panda Security are representative of certain limited segments, but that at the same time they are also illustrative of the gap between Vista adoption by home users and by the corporate world.