On the business front

Oct 8, 2007 14:01 GMT  ·  By

There is a huge gap in the Windows Vista numbers when it comes down to the business vs. the home fronts. In November 2006, Microsoft Chief executive officer was launching Windows Vista Enterprise to businesses at the NASDAQ headquarters in New York. Pushing the operating system first to Software Assurance users via volume licensing, was a move designed to emphasize the fact that Vista was an operating system focused on the corporate environment. Only in January 2007, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, also in NY, and together with Ballmer, launched the operating system for the general consumers.

By the end of Vista's first six months on the market, Microsoft provided the figure of 60 million shipped licenses of the operating system. But the Redmond company failed to make any sort of differentiation between the business and home sales of Vista, only revealing that on top of the 60 million copies sold, volume license agreements cover an additional 40 million machines for upgrades. However, analysts are reporting that the corporate world is extremely slow to pick-up Windows Vista. In this context, it seems that Vista's uptake in terms of businesses is considerably lagging the adoption by home users.

Alex Eckelberry, president of SunBelt, recently released some statistics taken by the company's CounterSpy Enterprise and by logging the visits to the company's official website. According to the data provided by CounterSpy Enterprise, Windows XP has a share of 82.91% of the client operating system usage; Windows 2000 is still going strong with 14.88%, Windows Sever 2003 is next with 1.83%; and only then comes Windows Vista RTM build 6000 with 0.32%, just ahead of Windows 2008 (0.03%).

"[The] sampling of what operating system CounterSpy Enterprise agents deployed at customer sites report back. In this particular sampling, the bias will be toward small to medium business, and shows a very slow adoption of Vista in business environments," Eckelberry commented.

However, the situation is a tad different when it comes to Vista adoption by home users. While Windows XP still has the lion's share with 83.90% of operating system usage, no less than 9.38% of all SunBelt online visitors run Windows Vista. Windows 2000 is at 3.59% and Windows Server 2003 1.62%, while Windows 98 is at 1.33%. Of course that there is no way to actually verify that visitors of the SunBelt official website come from the business or the home environments, but still, the data harvested by CounterSpy Enterprise proves that the corporate environment is still to open its arms to Windows Vista.