A recent survey by Forrester Research Ltd released last Wednesday shows that of the 50000 enterprise users surveyed 87.1% were still running Windows XP, only 8.8% were running Windows Vista which according to Forrester Research Analyst Thomas Mendel covered computers which had been upgraded from older versions of Windows (for example Windows 2000 or 98)

In this report Mendel states: “Enterprises still on the fence about Vista would be wise to consider following Intel’s lead and skip the system altogether.”

In response to the survey on the Microsoft Team blog Microsoft communications worker Chris Flores stated:

“First, this report doesn’t reflect the normal enterprise OS adoption cycle. Enterprise adoption of OSes has always been much slower than consumer adoption … It’s also important to note that we’ve sold 180 million copies of Windows Vista so far, 40 million of which were in the last quarter alone, and that there are thousands of enterprise customers deploying Windows Vista by the thousands of seats on a weekly basis, including heavy hitters like The United States Air Force, PPG Industries, and Cerner.”

He continued: “Given that there’s a mountain of evidence to refute this report - including multiple reports from Forrester and other top-tier analysts - this appears to be more focused on making sensationalist statements, rather than offering a thoughtful industry perspective, based on conversations with IT operations professionals or deep knowledge of enterprise deployment cycles. How is this useful guidance to customers?  It’s disappointing to see such a respected organization like Forrester take this approach.”

In conclusion I can understand Microsoft rightly wanting to respond to Mendel’s report, but it is noticeable that Flores didn’t dispute the factual findings, describing them as “a bunch of pesky statistics”.

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