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Far be it from me to poke gratuitously at Microsoft -- or anyone else for that matter (after all, you never know who you might want to pay you at some point in the future), but this bears comment. ComputerWeekly has a story today (Corporates still hold onto W2K) about the installed base of Windows op systems. I think the survey was done in the UK, but I'm not sure. The statistics are as follows:
AssetMetrix found that 48% of corporate IT environments were running Windows 2000 desktop -- only four percentage points less than in the fourth quarter of 2003.There is, of course, more in the short piece. And . . . ?Windows XP has risen in popularity from 6.6% to 38% during the same period. Windows 95 and Windows 98 have fallen from a collective 28% to less than 5%, and Windows NT has dropped from 13.5% to about 10%.
Many of us have been waiting for the promised applications, upgrades, fixes, and so on -- for identity and otherwise -- that are "coming in Longhorn" according to Microsofties at every level. Which is great except . . . what these data show is that just this past quarter has deployment of XP grown to a significant level. And only 4% of it comes at the expense of W2K. XP deployment could grow a little bit more in the next quarter or two -- maybe at the expense of W2K as the service period on W2K expires. Maybe at that point will the dominant OS version be XP.
Based on this history it would be reasonable to expect that better than 40% of the market will not have Longhorn for 3 or 4 years having "just" upgraded to XP. How many upgrades from the remaining 60%ish of Windows systems will go to Longhorn? (Are those remaining 1 out of 2 business still on W2K waiting with bated breath for Longhorn to come out?) More importantly, how quickly will they move?
Still dicey for anybody waiting for the functionality of Longhorn to drive their own capabilities.
Just food for thought.