Windows Vista is like "New Coke": Forrester Research

Being compared to one of the biggest marketing fiascoes corporate history, New Coke, is certainly telling. That's how Forrester Research views Windows Vista, as detailed in their latest survey on Enterprise Trends, released on Thursday.

It is, however, a case of good news / bad news. According to Forrester Research, Vista usage among businesses is up by more than 40% since January. Unfortunately, the total is still less than 10% of the 50,000 companies surveyed.

Besides the comparison to New Coke, Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel writes:

Eighteen months after the release of Windows Vista, enterprise adoption is still in the single digits, and the majority of that seems to have come from upgrades of legacy Windows versions, not XP. Here’s a tip: Consider following the lead of Microsoft’s most important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case for Vista. Windows 7 is penciled for release in Q1 2010.

The chart below, from the report, shows the problematic adoption rate.

Yep, 87.1% of enterprise users surveyed are still using XP. And with Linux's drop from 3.5% in February to 0.5% in June, and the Mac pretty much remaining flat, software firms need only "develop exclusively for Windows XP and Vista. Forget about Macs unless you're aiming at a specific business vertical where Mac use is prevalent."

More bad news for Microsoft as, on the other hand, Firefox usage is up to 19.4% of enterprise users from 16.8% at the beginning of the year while IE use dropped slightly from 79.1% in January to 77.6% at the end of June.. Because of this, Mendel wrote, "At least make sure that applications work on Firefox as well as IE -- this is a must." Of course, you could always use IETab or IEView for pages that don't work in Firefox, but it's easier if the page "just works."

Now, where's that can of Diet Pepsi?