Is Vista the "New Coke" of Operating Systems? - Systems Management News On The Web

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AS OF 8/20/2008 9:26AM EST

Is Vista the "New Coke" of Operating Systems?
By Michelle Savage

July 28, 2008 — Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel, along with analysts Jeffrey Hammond and Reedwan Iqbal, conducted a study of more than 50,000 users at large to very large enterprises throughout the first half of 2008.

Mendel called Vista “New Coke,” comparing the operating system to one of the biggest marketing disasters of all time. Like New Coke, Vista was launched with fanfare, and then was rejected by consumers. The study found that Vista has been rejected by enterprises, with only 8.8 percent of companies running the operating system, compared to the 87.1 percent running Windows XP. In addition, the majority of Vista users have come from upgrades of legacy Windows versions, not XP.

KACE, a systems management appliance company, released in July survey results that showed that 60 percent of the 1,100 IT administrators polled have no plans to deploy Vista—almost 10 percent more than originally reported in a November 2007 survey on the same topic.

Citing concerns about adding unwanted complexity to their IT environments, 42 percent of IT administrator respondents said they would consider deployment of alternative operating systems, such as Mac OS and Linux, in order to avoid a migration to Vista, and 92 percent said the release of Vista Service Pack 1 has not changed their plans for Vista deployment. The survey results showed the Mac operating system as the most likely alternative operating system to be deployed.

Forrester’s Mendel offered some advice to enterprises still considering Vista. “Consider the lead of Microsoft’s most important partner, Intel, and re-evaluating the case for Vista,” he wrote. “And who knows? By then Apple may have gotten its enterprise act together; Snow Leopard is a move in the right direction.”

Related Search Term(s): Windows, Apple, Microsoft

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