Microsoftis own Windows XP will be the biggest competitor to Vista and be the main factor in Vistais slow growth according to Gartner. The Gartner report was cited at the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday.
The Gartner report said that Vista would only end up on about 12 percent of PCs found in the home this year. It isnit expected to surpass XP until 2009.
Meanwhile, some analysts have predicted that Vistais emulation of Mac OS Xis look-and-feel would open the door to Linux. However, Gartneris figures contradict this view and predicted that Linuxis share would remain constant at around 4.1 per cent until at least 2010.
Gartner expects Appleis market share to remain at just under 3 percent.
In a related analysis at InfoWorld, the difficult and tedious process of migrating to Windows in the Enterprise was detailed. Businesses face the prospect of rolling out Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista all the at the same time. Even with Microsoftis deployment tools, the process will take years.
The InfoWorld story provided insight: "IT managers already en route to Vista land are finding that their users simply don?t want Vista. What they?re really after are Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 ? business-critical apps they perceive as essential to getting their work done."
These two studies by Gartner and InfoWorld reiterate the idea that while Vista adoption will be slow, and driven by the pace of business adoption, the entrenched Windows XP users, by and large, will be switching to Vista eventually and that Moc OS X and Linux will remain far behind.