And while consumers are more drawn to flashy new features, companies tend to be more concerned that new software is fully baked and bug-free -- something on which Microsoft has burned them in the past.
"A lot of people still have the impression that no Microsoft product is stable or complete until SP1 or SP2," said Sumeeth Evans, IT manager for Collegiate Housing Services. That's wrong, says Evans, who moved all 78 of the Indianapolis, Ind., firm's employees to Vista earlier this year and says he enjoys fewer help desk calls concerning Vista than XP.
On the horizon
Microsoft shipped a release candidate for Vista SP1 earlier this month. It still plans to release the final version in the first quarter next year.
And Microsoft isn't standing still. The company is actively pushing a slew of free tools designed to help companies more easily plan for and deploy Vista.
Collegiate Housing Services used the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment tool and the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 to help it upgrade to Vista, Evans said. The tools helped his IT team upgrade nearly three times the number PCs in half the man-hours, he said.
Microsoft says Windows Vista Hardware Assessment has been downloaded 329,000 times, Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 340,000 times, and the Business Desktop Deployment 2007 kit 283,000 times.
All this to say that things should start to pick up in the coming year. By the end of 2008, one-quarter of corporate PCs in North America and Europe will be running Vista, according to Forrester's Gray. Linux will make continue to make minor inroads, but Gray is unequivocal that corporations will eventually standardize upon Vista the same way they have on XP.
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