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Survey Says Vista Not Cracking the Enterprise

OK, we know. It's right up there with the news that the earth is round and the shocker that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Still, if you were curious, a new survey "reveals" that half of all IT managers have no plans to deploy Vista.

Well, they have no plans to deploy Vista "at this time," according to the survey. Don't let that bit on the end slip away. What happens when a company undergoes a hardware refresh and can't get anything but Vista for new machines? As we've suggested before in RCP, that's when Vista might finally make a break for enterprise pay dirt.

Or, if this survey is any indication, a hardware refresh might be the moment when mundane office workers in drab cubicles (hey, that description sounds familiar) might suddenly become hipsters with Apple logos on their machines. Does that mean that we'll also have to listen to obscure pop bands and stop watching big-budget movies in favor of indie "films"? The cultural ramifications could be massive. To the copy and paste from the RCPmag.com story:

"The survey asked participants if they had 'considered the possibility of deploying any non-Windows operating system as an alternative to adopting Windows Vista.' It turned out that 44 percent of participants said that they were indeed considering a non-Windows alternative....The Windows OS replacement that respondents mentioned most was Macintosh (28 percent), followed by Red Hat Linux (23 percent), SuSE Linux (18 percent), Ubuntu (18 percent), other Linux (nine percent) and not sure (four percent)."

Somewhere, Steve Jobs is laughing with delight. OK, so maybe there's some wishful thinking going on here in IT world -- it seems unlikely that companies would jettison major investments in Microsoft simply out of disdain for Vista -- but the survey numbers, for what they're worth, confirm that Vista still looks like a dud in the enterprise. If it does ever make a serious dent there -- and we still suspect that it will -- it'll be more because IT folks have little choice but to deploy it than because they actually like it.

A Mac in every cubicle? Really? Share your vision of this brave new world at [email protected].

Posted by Lee Pender on 02/20/2008 at 1:21 PM


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