Almost half of administrators say no to Windows Vista

Aug 17, 2007 15:29 GMT  ·  By

After the first six months of commercial availability for Windows Vista, Microsoft applauded the operating system's sales performances, as the platform pushed an estimated 60 million licenses worldwide. However, Sunbelt Software's president Alex Eckelberry painted an entirely different picture. And it reveals a perspective that will not bode well with the Redmond company. A complete failure of the $500 million Wow marketing campaign. SunPolls are run via the Sunbelt official website and respondents indicated that Windows Vista is not the way to go.

The SunPools "are completely unscientific but can provide you with a quick read into the "zeitgeist" of the market. We believe that the polls tend to reflect the attitude of corporate system administrators," Eckelberry explained. "Well, one of the most popular SunPolls in recent years asked the question. "Now that Vista is there, what are your plans for rolling it out?". A whopping 30% of responders said they uninstalled Vista from their admin station because Vista does not provide the admin tools that are in WinXP."

The new SunPoll via Sunbelt Software offers the question "Now that Windows Vista is out there, what are your plans for rolling it out?" 11% of respondents stated that they will be doing so in the next 12 to 24 months. An additional 9% is considering deploying Vista sometime in the next 24 to 36 months, by which time Windows Seven will be either already out, or on the brink of becoming available. 24% revealed that "Vista has almost nothing to offer" and that they wouldn't install the operating system in the next 36 months.

But the vast majority, no less than 45% of respondents were firm on the fact that Windows Vista is not even a choice, and that they will never deploy the operating system - "Never! (We're hoping we'll have a better OS by 2014 when the support for XP runs out)." And to top it all off, 9% have even expressed the desire to stop Vista from being deployed in their environment.

"I think that has a lot to do with the attitudes out there. Vista, plain vanilla Vista, is great. But the problem is like the problem with all new operating systems - driver and application compatibility. It's nothing new to say this, but I think Vista will have a chance as software support is improved and companies (Sunbelt included) continue to work out the kinks in their products to support this evolution in Microsoft's OS," Eckelberry added.