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Analysts have said that Microsoft’s new operating system is ‘not meeting expectations,’ a year after Vista went gold and was sent off for duplication.
"The uptake is much lower than expected," said Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner. "Organizations really seem to be way behind where they said they would be last year.
"They overestimated their vendors’ abilities to get Vista-supported versions of their applications done, they underestimated the difficulty of moving to Vista and they overestimated the value of Vista," explaining why so few enterprise customers had upgraded to the operating system, adding that many companies are nine to 12 months behind where they had intended to be at this point in terms of adoption.
"It’s just a much slower deployment overall," he said. "Now we’re hearing a lot of folks talking about late 2008, early 2009. Before, they’d been saying late 2007, early 2008."
It was a point echoed by other analysts, including Michael Cherry, an analyst with Decisions.
"I don’t see anyone rushing out to do [the upgrade], especially now that SP1 is on the immediate horizon," said Cherry. "Vista is totally a product for new hardware," recommending companies leave upgrading to it until they upgrade their hardware.
There is some good news for Microsoft though. Analysts have so far refused to call it a failure thanks in part to the massive 88 million copies the vendor has shipped to retailer – twice as much as what XP shipped in the same period.
"It’s pretty hard to call it a failure," said Cherry. "Any other company would love to have had a product launch like this." But Microsoft isn’t just any other company, he added. "Microsoft can afford to wait for Vista to become a success."
