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Vista struggles to attract enterprise users

Tim Ferguson silicon.com

Published: 03 Apr 2008 08:23 BST

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is taking a while to catch on, with just 6.3 percent of enterprise users on the OS by the end of 2007.

And according to research by Forrester Research, most upgrades were from users of Windows 2000 — which lost around six percent of users — rather than XP, which Vista is intended to replace.

Around a quarter of enterprises plan to upgrade to Vista in 2008 although Forrester said companies may change plans and wait for the release of Windows 7 — pencilled in for the second half of 2009.

Adoption of Microsoft's latest browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), has also been sluggish, with just 30 percent of enterprise users on it 15 months after its launch.

Slightly more than 70 percent of those surveyed were still using IE6 at the end of last year, despite the imminent arrival of a beta version of IE8.

In contrast, Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 virtually replaced Firefox 1.5 the same period after its release.

The proportion of users on Firefox actually doubled during 2007, with 18 percent using it at the end of the year. The proportion of users on all versions of IE fell by 10 percent.

The survey quizzed more than 50,000 users from 2,300 large enterprises over the course of 2007.

Credit: Windows Vista take-up crawls at snail's pace from silicon.com