Vista Lands a Whopping 2 Percent Share of Businesses

More bad news for Microsoft's Vista platform. While it's merely unpopular with consumers, when it comes to business buyers, it's a total non-starter. A new poll shows that a mere 2 percent of businesses are running the OS, and only 9 percent more say they plan to roll it out in the next three months.

The vast majority of businesses say they'll be sticking with their existing versions of Windows, which are working just fine, thanks.

While you might chalk this up as cautiousness since Vista is still relatively new, but this picture is starkly different than what businesses were saying before Vista arrived. A different vendor polled businesses in December 2006 and found at that time that 43 percent said they were planning to jump to Vista.

What's changed since then? The Computerworld story linked above blames skepticism over Vista's improved security claims, but research has shown that Vista is actually doing fairly well on the security front. It may not be a cast-in-stone-solid OS, but Vista has been far from a bonanza for hackers, at least.

My hunch is that businesses are balking for a few major reasons: Their existing hardware can't run Vista (at least not very well), and they know that users accustomed to XP would require substantial training to re-learn how to do things with Vista because average users find the interface to be so different than before. If you've been watching the economy and the stock market lately, you know what the competitive environment is like out there. Who wants to pull all their staff into lengthy training sessions and listen to the complaints of frustrated users who can't figure out where the C: drive went?

LINK: Businesses having second thoughts about Vista