Dell now bullish about Windows Vista

Months after Dell bowed to customers’ pressure and dumped its Windows Vista-only policy by adding Windows XP again, the company is now optimistic about Vista uptake.

Michael Dell, speaking at Gartner’s ITxpo Symposium in Orlando, Florida, said: “We have a number [of business customers] who have gone to Vista, and almost all are planning to go to Vista: some in 2008, and some in 2009. As they take on new IT deployments with new hardware features, Vista will be much better supported,” ZDNet writes.

Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn’t seem not so convinced about Vista uptake. It has even offered a “downgrade” option to buyers that get machines with Vista but want to switch to Windows XP. In addition, Microsoft also extended the sales life of XP.

In April, Dell dumped its Windows Vista-only policy by adding Windows XP again after it bowed down to customers pressure saying “We heard you loud and clear on bringing the Windows XP option back to our Dell consumer PC offerings.”

In addition to selling PCs with Windows XP installed again, Dell offered Ubuntu Linux pre-loaded PCs in May.

A recent survey released by a market research company Context, indicates that the August volume of Vista sales for business machines dropped by 17% from the previous month.

While of course Dell can say what he wants, and no doubt Microsoft would welcome his comments, it does seem that on this occasion his comments seem to be out of sync with what seems to actually be happening in the market.

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