As I write this, more than 1500 have taken part in my poll about Vista deployment. It is no secret that Vista isn't really a success among corporate customers. However, I must admit, I am a bit surprised by the results of this poll.
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First of all, this is a blog for Windows admins. You would expect a somewhat more positive attitude towards Vista. Considering that more than one third said that their organization will wait for Windows 7 and 19% even plans to move to another OS means that the majority of IT pros are quite dissatisfied with Vista.
Perhaps Vista SP1 will change this attitude a little. But I doubt that we will see major shifts here within the next year. However, I also believe that some organization will change their view when they have to buy new hardware. Since most companies stick with the Windows version once it is deployed on new hardware, it would mean that they had to live with XP for the next 3 to 5 years. And for their employees that would entail working soon with an OS that is more than 10 years old.
Most surprising, certainly, is that 19% are planning to move to another OS. In my original article about this poll, I asked them to choose this answer if Windows is the major desktop OS in their organization. I don't know how many voters really read this article, though. Anyway, if those plans are put into action then Microsoft market share in the desktop OS market would drop far below 80%. It is hard to believe somehow that this would really happen. I guess it is quite enticing to express ones dissatisfaction with Vista in such a poll, but to actually change your whole infrastructure just because one of your printers isn't supported anymore or because UAC gets on your nerves is somewhat different.
18% already deployed Vista which is not too bad considering the bad press coverage and 13% are planning to do so within this year. My guess is that the majority of them waited for SP1. The other 16% who want to move to Vista in 2009 probably would wait until they have to buy new PCs.
The result of this poll indicates that there are basically two groups among my readers. One group is quite dissatisfied with Vista. Most of them will probably not change their mind anymore. They will do everything to avoid Vista. The other group probably consists of two subgroups. Some like Vista, but for the majority it is just business as usual. Due to the lack of alternatives, they just go ahead and deploy Microsoft's latest OS whenever they are ready for it. All in all, this confirms the impression I got when I talked with other IT pros about Vista in the last months.
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You want to know to which group I belong? If you are a long term reader, you will know that I like Vista although I admit that it has quite a few downsides. At the moment, we only have a couple of Vista machines in my organization, but we will start the first major roll-out as soon as we get a large number of new PCs. We have been planning this for some months now. Actually, we are just waiting for the money. But in the public sector, these things are often hard to predict.
