Report: Vista rejected like ‘new Coke’ by enterprises, Macs making a little progress
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jul 24, 2008 at 6:08pm
Fewer than one in 11 of the PCs being used in large or very large enterprises runs Windows Vista, according to a new study by Forrester Research. Meanwhile, the share of Macs in the enterprise grew to 4.5 percent in June from 3.7 percent in January 2008, and 80 percent of those are Intel-based Macs.
But Apple still has a long way to go in this arena. Forrester says that Vista still has double the share of Macs among big businesses.
Of the 50,000 enterprise users surveyed by the research firm, 87.1 percent were still running Windows XP at the end of June, compared to 8.8 percent for Vista. According to Thomas Mendel, author of the Forrester report, this implies that the majority of PCs upgraded to Vista were those running older versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 or 98.
“Vista is ‘new Coke,’” Mendel wrote, comparing Microsoft’s flagship operating system to the ill-fated soft drink. Enterprises still on the fence about Vista would be wise, he said, to “consider following the lead of Microsoft’s important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case of Vista.”
Computerworld says Wendel’s comments undercut the momentum for Vista claimed by Microsoft, which says it has sold 180 million licenses for its 18-month-old operating system to PC makers and end users.
But despite the lack of support for Vista, with the Mac’s small enterprise market share, Mendel says that enterprise enterprise application developers should just “develop exclusively for Windows XP and Vista” and “forget about Macs unless you’re aiming at a specific business vertical where Mac use is prevalent.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
