Sixty percent of IT administrators have no plans to deploy Vista despite Service Pack 1, which fixed some of the operating systems problems, according to a survey of 1,100 IT managers.
The survey, conducted by KACE, which makes systems management appliances, found that there are 10 percent more holdouts on Vista deployments. Forty two percent of administrators said they would consider alternative operating systems like Linux and Apple to avoid Vista and 92 percent said the release of SP1 didn’t alter their plans.
KACE notes that the Vista conundrum can lead to new problems. For instance, IT shops aren’t used to managing multiple operating systems and haven’t researched Apple OS X or Linux enough. To be sure, KACE’s reason for the survey was to pitch its KBox, which is an appliance designed to manage multiple operating systems. Given that disclosure you may want to take the survey with a grain of salt (as a rule I’m skeptical of vendor surveys, but it’s worth passing on).
The bottom line according to KACE is that Microsoft is facing an uphill climb as it tries to alter Vista’s perception.
By the way, I’ve gotten a bunch of emails telling me that Vista has been fine and I should give it a go. But pricing a laptop I couldn’t help but notice that a Dell with Ubuntu is a lot of horsepower on the cheap. I’m still evaluating my next move, but choices abound. On the corporate level choices also abound.
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