Vista, Year One: Still Not Finding Business Users

After nearly a year on the market, the numbers are in and Vista sales are helping drive Microsoft to its fastest growth rate in seven years... but that growth seems to be coming almost exclusively from the consumer market (particularly via new PCs with Vista preinstalled), as businesses have so far shunned the new OS.

Analysts are unanimous that Vista has made no real dent in the enterprise market at all so far; Gartner says businesses have postponed upgrade plans from XP for a year off of their original schedules. At the time of release, many companies were eyeing late 2007/early 2008 for upgrades. Now those schedules have slipped to late 2008/early 2009. And that's just what people are saying this month... who knows how the situation will change when November 2008 rolls around.

Decisions on Microsoft, another analyst firm, notes that Service Pack 1's imminent arrival is additional cause for people to sit Vista out for now.

Gartner's Michael Silver offers a candid explanation for why Vista is having such a tough time cracking the business market: "When you're coming from an OS that wasn't all that great, you don't notice the hiccups as much. But when you're moving from something stable like XP and end with instability, everything is magnified." I'd also add that Vista still offers no real compelling reason to upgrade feature-wise, costs a ton, and requires substantial retraining when deployed in a business environment, especially one with novice users. That all adds up to corporate resistance like we haven't seen in a decade.

LINK: Analysts grade Vista's first year: Did not meet expectations