2007 might not have been the Wow's year, but in 2008 Windows Vista will explode. All the starts are aligned for Vista adoption to go through the roof. As a matter of fact, 2008 will prove the first truly fertile year for the Wow from the household to the corporate environment. At the end of the first ear since the platform was released to manufacturing, Microsoft revealed that it shipped in excess of 88 million Vista licenses to its channel partners, owning a little over 7% of the operating system market. However, Vista's uptake has been especially low when it comes down to businesses, but this aspect will not survive throughout the coming year.

"Desktop operations managers have been focused on one objective for their corporate operating system (OS) environment: standardization. And they've been largely successful, according to Forrester's most recent hardware survey, with 84% of PCs in North American and European enterprises powered by Windows XP and just 11% running Windows 2000. But this is all about to change," stated Benjamin Gray, Forrester Analyst.

Well over a year after the business launch of Vista in 2006, and the consumer release in 2007, both home and corporate consumers will begin increasingly embracing the operating system. The release of the first service pack for Vista, currently planned for the first quarter of 2008, will be a turning point for the Windows client. By mid 2008, Vista will not only have an SP1 to show for, but also a mature environment built around it which will become synonymous with a ripe period for adoption. Outside of the corporate arena, Vista has performed quite well, and the uptake is only bound to accelerate with the availability of SP1.

"Enterprises are about to begin large-scale migrations to Windows Vista. OS migrations are massive projects that take years, and Windows Vista will be no exception. IT will have to work hard to continue to standardize the OS environment during the final Windows Vista preparations, and continue to manage dual OSes as pilots mature into full-scale deployments. Forrester expects at least one-third of enterprises to begin to deploy Windows Vista enterprisewide by mid-2008 as more applications will be certified, hardware will be refreshed and ready to run Windows Vista smoothly, and price points will make compatible machines more affordable than they are today", Gray added.