What's the ramp going to be on Vista?

October 13, 2006 7:35 AM

What is the ramp of Vista going to be like?

I'm researching how many computers, on the whole, and as a percentage, are going to upgrade to Vista in the first few months (6 or so) of Vista's introduction.

I am looking for any numbers, statistics, or other research. Ideally, i'd find:

1) The aggregate by month # of computers running Vista
2) The percentage of new computers versus existing computers upgrading to Vista
3) Geography-based information on these statistics.
4) Broken down by laptops versus desktops.

My GoogleFu comes up with a bunch of stuff.. but WAY old. Now that we're close, and everything is settlling in, how is this sucker gonna ramp?

It has lots of implications. IE7, applications that don't work with Vista, etc.

Any thoughts or better links than the ones I found?

Thanks,

William

posted by wflanagan to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

XP adoption was slow. I imagine it will be the same for Vista, although Microsoft seems to disagree.

Microsoft’s bullish projections don’t appear to jibe with most current third-party customer surveys, such as one online survey of 314 IT professionals conducted by Computerworld in August. Just 17 percent of IT professionals say they are considering rolling out Windows Vista in the first year. Forty-one percent of respondents said they had no plans to roll out Vista, while 35 percent said they would begin testing Vista only after it ships.

Of those who said they were considering rolling out Vista in the near or long-term, the largest group (29 percent) said the cost was the biggest determinant of if and when they would upgrade. That was followed by the hardware requirements (16 percent), the amount of employee training (6 percent) and the amount of IT staff retraining (4 percent).

I'm of the mindset adoption will follow through new computer purchases and support issues. Seeing sixteen Vista editions on the shelf won't help Joe Somebody make a purchasing decision right away either. And the confusing licensing! They're not helping themselves with rapid adoption.

Here's another survey which has quite a bit more numbers. Even though it is 9 months old, the sentiments are probably the same.
posted by pedantic at 8:32 AM on October 13, 2006

Note that IE7 is going to be pushed out to all XP users that use XP's auto-update feature soon enough, so the IE7 implications are going to hit much earlier than Vista's projected release date.
posted by antifuse at 8:34 AM on October 13, 2006

I get paid to figure out the answer to your questions. Pedantic's quote is spot on with the internal and public stuff I've read from outfits like Gartner and Microsoft itself.

I also was tasked to figure you the update of Windows 95 way back in the day. It is the same thing story. XP came along it was the same thing.

Gartner's rule of thumb for its enterprise clients on new OSes is wait for after at least the first service pack. The ramp on the corporate side will be slow. This could be especially true with Vista. Things like Aero Glass require richer hardware and do not help productivity. Yes, there are management and security fixes in Vista, but still, why go through the pain of upgrading? In sites where it isn't broken, why fix it? There are still a lot of corporate sites running Win2K. I read on some doc from Microsoft it hopes Vista's ramp happens twice as fast as it did with XP. But we're still talking about measuring things in years versus months.

After launch, all consumer systems sold with Windows will have Vista pre-installed. Microsoft will spend millions and millions on getting consumers to buy the upgrade. You will have to live in cave to avoid the marketing push. This will help the ramp, but many people will just wait until their old Windows PC needs to be replaced to get Vista pre-installed.

For people buying the OS as an upgrade in retail, only Vista Home, Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate will be on shelves. Users can then upgrade laters since all of the versions of the OS will be on the same DVD. Corporate customers and OEMs will offer the other 13 versions of the OS. For the most part, most businesses running XP Pro now will go to Enterprise or Business.

I agree with antifuse, IE 7 [and WMP11] will ramp much quickly to the massive installed base of XP and Win2K users in both commercial and consumer settings. Many corporate sites might push out IE7 to its users as a way to close some security loopholes [but will wait for a service pack first]. Sites with managed clients and locked down systems will keep users from upgrading on their own and will only upgrade after the internal web-based apps are shown to work in IE7.

Geographically, Vista will be adopted faster in the major economies where people can afford and use legit copies of Windows. The regions with high pirated OS rates will be a little slower until the crafty pirates successfully break the activiation process. MS is trying to offset that Vista Basic, but that won't help too much. The starter edition is so limited so even at the lower cost to OEMs, most actually users will put a bootleg copy of the Vista Home on their system.

Easily, the majority of IE users this time next year will be using IE7 to access the interweb. One, it is free. Two, MS will stop issuing patches to IE6 and push people that way. Three, you don't need to buy a new computer to take advantage of it.

Ultimately, Microsoft can control the adoption rate by dropping prices and merchandising programs with retailers and corporate customers. Only those that ran the models in Redmond know these details.
posted by birdherder at 11:03 AM on October 13, 2006