‘New Coke’ taunt continues to plague Vista

A study of 50,000 computer users in large businesses has found just 8.8% are running Vista, leading the author to dub the system “Microsoft’s New Coke”.

The Forrester Research Survey found 87.1% were still running XP, with author Thomas Mendel concluding many of those upgrading to Vista did so from earlier Windows editions such as 2000 or 98.

Macs made up 4.5% of the computer systems used by the businesses, while Linux made up just 0.5%. That’s dropped from 1.8% in Forrester’s previous study just six months ago, which makes you wonder how much of a margin of error there is in such a study. A panel of 50,000 is extremely high by most survey standards, but there doesn’t seem any business reason why the Linux figure should drop so dramatically.

The big question from the Forrester study is what it tells us about Microsoft reporting 180 million copies of Vista being sold so far, with sales strong among businesses. Some are now speculating that this could mean many firms have bought new computers with Vista pre-installed and then ‘downgraded’ to XP. Of course, while this practice could hurt Vista’s momentum, Microsoft will still have got the cash from such Vista sales.

Writing about the study, Alexander Wolfe of Information Week makes an interesting point on the issue of business take-up. He argues that in today’s market it simply isn’t realistic to expect widespread take-up of every new edition of Windows – a point that’s stronger when you consider the six-year gap between XP and Vista appears to be a one-off in the Windows release cycle.

But the ‘New Coke’ analogy seems to be catching on. As we reported yesterday, the comparison also appeared in a response to coverage of Microsoft’s ‘Mojave’ experiment. In that case the writer was likening Microsoft showing a video of Vista (under a false name) to a testing panel rather than letting them use it, to the taste tests where Coke produced positive results for its new brand by only letting those tested take a sip rather than drink an entire can.

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• Microsoft tries to chop down Forrester claims
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