Enterprise Vista Adoption Is Better, Not Great
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Today, CDW released its third Vista and Office 2007 adoption survey. Enterprise Vista adoption is increasing, but the data isn't as rosy as CDW's announcement suggests. |
I haven't seen the whole survey, just the final report issued by CDW. The spin: Forty-eight percent of enterprises are using or evaluating Windows Vista. But combining adopters with evaluators greatly increases the number. Granted, Vista is making gains but nowhere near what that 48 percent number suggests.
No surprise, CDW spun the numbers more positively, as it did with the results from the two previous studies. CDW's business is about selling products or services to enterprises, and there is lots of money to be made around Vista deployments. An upbeat message can help get fence sitters moving to Vista. Call it peer pressure, need to belong or competitive concerns. Upbeat Vista adoption information is going to affect somebody's decision tree.
"Here is the data that says more of your peer organizations are in evaluations as well," said David Cottingham, CDW's director of product and partner management. He described the study as a service to CDW customers.
Bottom line: 13 percent of survey respondents said they had completed their Windows Vista migration, up from 6 percent from CDW's last survey. At first glance, the number isn't too shabby. After all, Vista hasn't really been available for a full year year. January 30 is the anniversary when Vista was available to anybody. But deeper look at the numbers reveals that Vista enterprise adoption is quite modest.
CDW commissioned Walker Information to conduct all three surveys. Walker polled IT decision makers for what CDW calls the "Wave 2" survey in February 2007. Walker conducted the "Wave 3" survey—772 IT decision makers—the first week of November. Microsoft got a big spurt of adopters, 6 percent, from November 2006 to February 2007, based on the Wave 2 survey. The number moved up only to 13 percent in the following 10 months, based on the the third survey. Those gains are modest, at best, when looked in context of IT organization concerns about Vista.
That said, the future looks brighter. About 60 percent of IT decision makers said that their organizations would complete Vista migrations within 12 months, or before the end of 2008. But that finding is somewhat contradictory with another: 46 percent of enterprises are starting to evaluate Windows Vista. While down from 61 percent in February 2007, it's still a colossal number of early-stage evaluators.
More troubling for Microsoft is IT decision maker response to Windows Vista. All nine metrics for judging Vista satisfaction declined from the November 2006, or Wave 1, survey. Three highly touted areas of Vista benefit—improved patch management, improved security and new networking features—dramatically declined.
Much of the application incompatibility pain Microsoft inflicted on IT organizations resulted from changes to Windows security architecture. But security improvements, as an attractive attribute, dropped from 78 percent to 65 percent between the Wave 2 and 3 surveys. That said, and in fairness to Microsoft, security still ranks the highest with respect to feature satisfaction, followed by performance and Windows Update improvements.
Something else: Two of the IT decision makers' top Vista concerns should really bother Microsoft. Both are related: No.2, unclear benefits; no. 3, the current operating system (most likely Windows XP) is good enough. CDW didn't ask about Windows XP, which is too bad. If enterprises don't see something better in Vista, why should they migrate from XP?
There is also a fundamental weakness in the survey, which perhaps CDW and Walker couldn't anticipate: Microsoft's Vista Service Pack 1. Microsoft released the first SP1 Release Candidate about a month after Walker conducted the survey. I wouldn't be surprised to see an increase in testing and deployment, because of the release candidate, and even an acceleration of deployments—more enterprises completing deployments within 12 months.
Still the survey captured some nuance: "25 percent were using the beta version of Service Pack 1 when they responded to our survey," Cottingham said.
While enterprise Vista adoption isn't as good as CDW's spin, it's not terribly bad either. Some of the data is quite encouraging. Hardware is much less a concern than it was a year ago. Concerns that Vista hardware requirements are too excessive dropped from 37 percent to 27 percent between the Wave 2 and 3 surveys.
"It's a result of more evaluating and testing," Cottingham said. "We're playing with systems that are 13, 14, 15 months faster and stronger."
[Editor's Note: CDW comment added.]
Related Posts:
- Vista SP1: Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?, Microsoft Watch, Jan. 11, 2008
- Windows Vista's 100 Million, Microsoft Watch, Jan. 6, 2008
- What Went Wrong With Windows Vista?, Microsoft Watch, Dec. 6, 2007
- How Will Microsoft Grow Windows Sales?, Microsoft Watch, Nov. 15, 2007
- What Is the Vista Experience?, Microsoft Watch, Nov. 14, 2007
- Vista Adoption Will Continue at Slow Pace, Microsoft Watch, Nov. 14, 2007
- Vista's Consumer Rocket Ride to the Enterprise, Microsoft Watch, Nov. 8, 2007
- Vista: One Year Later, Microsoft Watch, Nov. 8, 2007
- Windows Vista Ultimate: Plus or Minus, Microsoft Watch, Sept. 26, 2007
- What Windows Vista Does for Me, Microsoft Watch, Sept. 14, 2007
- Yes, Virginia, There Is a Vista SP1, Microsoft Watch, Aug. 29, 2007
- Don't Have a WOW, Man, Microsoft Watch, Aug. 28, 2007
- Broken Windows, Microsoft Watch, Aug. 9, 2007
- Microsoft: No Rush to Vista SP1, Microsoft Watch, July 19, 2007
- I Shacked Up with Windows Vista, Microsoft Watch, May 10, 2007
- IT Organizations: Cautious Vista Testing and Deployment, Microsoft Watch, May 8, 2007
- Another View of Vista Adoption, Microsoft Watch, Nov. 13, 2006
Comments (7)
"About 60 percent of IT decision makers said that they're organizations would complete Vista migrations within 12 months, or before the end of 2008."
If the 'New Hampshire exit polls' taught us anything...
Posted by n0neXn0ne | January 14, 2008 4:34 PM
No problem upgrading to Vi$ta for your business, all you need is money, lots of it. For new computers with Vi$ta preinstalled, for new printers that work with Vi$ta, new scanners, new software as the old XP programs will probably not work right.
And when you finally get the mess sorted out, and marginally running, although not as well as XP, here comes Windows Seven and the next upgrade cycle. LOL
Now you could start deploying Free community distro Linux, like PCLinuxOS, Mepis, Mint, or Ubuntu. That would save your business a ton of money, in hardware, software, and missing the next two M$ upgrade cycles, Vi$ta and $even. But hey, its fun spending money.
The real news;
Microsoft Faces 2 New European Union Antitrust Probes
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aCgQJIPg2DXc&refer=europe
Posted by chips | January 14, 2008 4:50 PM
Joe, are you up to speed yet? You can email me questions if you want, i'm not bound by a NDA.lol
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You're damn right...
If Microsoft doesn't deliver on their November 2007 promise to reveal Silverlight at Mix 08 it WILL be as a result of their fear of infringing on VCSY's patent 7076521 in broad daylight.
So they will likely fudge on that promise too and try to foist a crap ball on the Olympics committee.
http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_M/threadview?m=tm&bn=12004&tid=1330624&mid=1330624&tof=12&frt=1
Posted by I-Man | January 14, 2008 5:56 PM
In February '07, a total of 42% of those that had not adopted Vista said that they were going to going to migrate within the next 3-6 months. Eleven months later, an additional 7% have done so. This is almost a year after 17% said that adoption was imminent (within three months). It not only looks like they changed their minds, but there has been no move into the "imminent" group (now down 6% to 11%) to replace that meager 7% of respondants that did adopt Vista. Worse, there has been absolutely no increase in those planning to adopt sometime between 6 months and infinity (76% now, vs. 77% in February 07).
No, nOneXnOne, this far worse than the exit polls in New Hampshire! Since there is no category for those who plan not to adopt Vista, the results are akin to forecasting next November's New Hampshire vote from a poll that asked everybody to make choices from just one party--you get relative, rather than absolute, preferences, with no indication that the respondent has any desire to actually vote for that candidate. Even with that bias, the results from this poll indicate that in a "one party election," the "candidate" could not get the majority of the vote!
Maybe someone should create a video spoof entitled, "The Empire Strikes Out!"
Posted by pinball | January 14, 2008 5:59 PM
We shall rain down death and destruction upon the infidel Microsoft! It shall be torn apart under the relentless hail of our terrible, much-vaunted VCSY-weapons!
What are our terrible, much-vaunted VCSY-weapons, you may ask? Well may you ask! Don't ask!
Posted by I-Man Al-Zawahiri | January 14, 2008 9:36 PM
"No, nOneXnOne, this far worse than the exit polls in New Hampshire! Since there is no category for those who plan not to adopt Vista"
You are right.
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Will Windows Vista Succeed In 2008? Don't Count On It
Vista has certainly been slow out of the gate. Sure, Microsoft is putting the operating system on newly shipped systems, but Vista sales didn’t benefit from the upgrade surge that previous OSes got upon release. A year after it began shipping, less than one percent of corporate desktops are running Vista.
Financial issues could also work against Vista adoption during 2008. The sub-prime mortgage meltdown may foreshadow a recession; at minimum, the financial services industry is certain to scale back its computing needs. Even companies that budgeted a Vista upgrade in 2008 may reconsider the decision if the economy turns sour.
Given the slow adoption of Vista, an uncertain economy, and customer contentment with XP, it’s becoming a safe bet that Microsoft’s XP support will not end in 2011. Too many critical customers will be running XP in 2011 for Microsoft to even consider dropping what they call Extended Support, which includes security patches. There’s even a precedent: Windows 98. Support for that OS was originally supposed to end in January 2004, but Microsoft announced that they would continue support until June 2006.
If history replays itself, Microsoft will wait until the absolute last minute to announce that XP support will be extended. In the case of Windows 98, the announcement was made just weeks before support was to expire. If customers know that XP is safe for years to come, they’ll have even fewer reasons to upgrade to Vista, and that list is already too short for Microsoft's comfort.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/01/will_windows_vi.html
Posted by Marco | January 15, 2008 2:58 PM
I think the survey shows that there isn't a rush towards Vista. It would be nice to see a survey done with the same respondents about their perception of XP.
Even after months of using Vista of and on I still don't see what benefits it brings to the table other than looks - and I don't even like the way it looks.
Any other software vendor would purge the entire team if this is what comes out after more than five years of development (including reuse of a lot of old, broken code) and millions in investments. Any other software vendor with intelligent managers would have canceled the project after a few years and put the resource to something more promising. Instead Microsoft's management cut out what really is sorely needed: a new file system that is at least on par with the open-source counterparts or just use one (or more) of those for compatibility reasons.
Posted by Dave | January 20, 2008 8:23 AM