A Forrester Research study provides some good news for Microsoft: Vista usage among businesses is up by more than 40 percent since January.
However, the bad news is that less than 10 percent of the 2,300 companies surveyed use Vista.
More troubling for Microsoft may be the fact that most of those Vista installations were replacing versions of Windows other than Windows XP, which remains popular with both businesses and consumers. Forrester said 87.1 percent of companies surveyed continue to use Windows XP.
In the report, Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel said there is a strong case for bypassing the release altogether.
"Windows 7 is pencilled for release in [the first quarter of] 2010. And, who knows, by then Apple may have even got its enterprise act together," Mendel wrote.
Microsoft has been touting the fact that Vista adoption is on par with past releases, pointing to new customers, such as the U.S. Air Force. Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte told ZDNet Asia sister site CNET News.com on Wednesday that, at the end of June, Vista was tracking slightly ahead of Windows XP in corporate adoption at the same stage in its life cycle.
However, even some of the company's showcase early adopter customers are moving more slowly to Vista than originally planned.
Continental Airlines said in June of last year that it expected to have 7,000 to 10,000 desktops moved to the operating system by the end of 2007. As of May 2008, it had only shifted about 2,600 machines to Vista. Continental Airlines said it now expects the majority of its machines to be on Vista by the end of this year, according to a recent white paper.
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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