Microsoft's decision to have both Windows XP and Windows Vista available concomitantly on the market was a move that inherently backfired against the company. Comparisons involving the two Windows operating system versions favored Vista very little, being, quite to the contrary, beneficial for XP instead. However, this scenario is valid for XP SP2 and Vista RTM. With the advent of SP1 for Vista and SP3 for XP the situation has evolved. First of all, the barrage of criticism targeted at the latest version of the Windows client has toned down. And with SP1 softening all the rough corners of Vista, its adoption is well above that of Windows XP SP3.

According to statistics made available by Devil Mountain Software, Vista SP1 adoption at the end of July 2008 hit a high of 86%. But even as early as April the uptake rate was 69%, at just one month after Microsoft permitted access to the gold bits of SP1, which was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008.

"There was tremendous pent-up demand for Vista SP1, either due to customer dissatisfaction with the product or because users were convinced of its benefits from all of the media hype surrounding its release. No similar demand existed for Windows XP Service Pack 3, most likely because, overall, the majority of users are quite happy with Windows XP + Service Pack 2 (we found just a handful of users still running Service Pack 1)," a Devil Mountain Software representative revealed.

As far as XP SP3 is concerned, estimates put the adoption rate of the service pack at just 34% in April. This number is unsurprising, as only in April 2008 did Microsoft finally manage to produce the final version of XP SP3. However, by the end of July, only 47% of all XP users had deployed the third and final service pack for Vista's precursor.

"What seems clear from these numbers is that Microsoft’s customers felt Windows Vista was in urgent need of a Service Pack 12-18 months after it was released, while those still using Windows XP were relatively happy with the platform and in no rush to patch it," the Devil Mountain Software researcher added.