ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

A recent survey indicates that 60 percent of IT professionals surveyed are not planning to deploy Vista. That's 10 percent more than a similar survey administered last November. And 92 percent said the Service Pack did not change their mind. Maybe Microsoft's $300 million marketing campaign will do the trick. Maybe not.

The survey, was conducted with over 1,100 IT managers by King Research and commissioned by KACE, a systems management appliance company. It is a follow up to one the firm did in November, 2007 and the numbers are illuminating, as they demonstrate that the initial reaction to Vista among many IT pros hasn't changed much.

Among the findings:

• 60 percent of the survey respondents indicated they have no plans to deploy Vista at this time, up from 53 percent in the 2007 survey
• 92 percent indicated Vista Service Pack 1 has not changed their plans for Vista deployment
• 83 percent revealed they are concerned about the compatibility of required business software with Vista

Diane Hagglund of King Research and the survey's author, had this to say: "The second version of the Vista Adoption Trends survey clearly demonstrates Microsoft is still fighting an uphill battle with Vista and the release of Vista Service Pack 1 did little to change corporate opinion about the operating system."

Microsoft is desperately working on other ways to change corporate opinion of its embattled OS – but its unclear how a $300 million marketing campaign, part of which involves duping "customers" who didn't realize they were using Vista, will change anybody's mind about an OS that has serious implementation and compatibility issues.
There is some good news in the survey: Only 42 percent have considered deploying non-Windows operating systems to avoid Vista compared with 44 percent in the November 2007 survey.

But that's probably cold comfort to Microsoft: Mac OS (at 29 percent) is the most likely operating system to be deployed in place of Vista.

As Rob Meinhardt, co-founder and CEO of KACE, points out: "This delay in Vista adoption is leaving the window open longer for Mac and Linux to sneak onto the corporate desktop."
And once those alternatives are there, they'll most likely stay.

Unless, that is, Microsoft stops making commercials about Vista and starts focusing on why so many users have so many complaints about Vista and what they can do to fix that.