The tide may be beginning to turn for Vista. In our latest snapshot of the Windows Sentinel community, Microsoft??™s much-maligned OS (all flavors) shows up on ~31% of sampled systems ??“ a gain of nearly 12 percentage points versus our previous sample earlier in Q2.
At the same time, Windows XP (all flavors) dropped 10 percentage points, from 74% to 64% of sampled systems. Among XP users, ~42% have deployed Service Pack 2, up 8 points from early Q2, while Vista users are deploying SP1 at a rate of 83%, up from 66% in our last snapshot.
These results were taken from our nearly 3000 strong community of contributing Windows-based desktops and servers.
Of course, the real winner in all of this will be Windows 7. As we??™ve noted in the past, Microsoft has always had Moore??™s Law on its side. It was only with Vista that its penchant for code bloat significantly outpaced the hardware??™s ability to sop up the overages. Now, with a majority of the installed base capable of running Vista with adequate performance, the door is wide-open for a similarly-spec??™d follow on OS to sweep the industry and help Microsoft close the book on its pre-Vista Windows history.
Source: InfoWorld