On the launch of their new range of business notebooks, HP revealed that business PC buyers are still overwhelmingly opting for XP. Microsoft had announced last month that Vista has sold tens of millions of copies – and is selling at a faster rate than XP ever did.
“From the 30th June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP license,” said Jane Bradburn market development manager HP. “However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business license but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today.”
In other words, Microsoft counts a sale for Vista, even though the computer is sold with XP. If you count two different OS sales as one, then definitely Vista will sell faster than XP. Poor XP didn’t have a second OS supporting its sales. According to HP’s group manager of commercial products, business will not see much value in upgrading to Vista until late next year. But Microsoft has told HP that it will have to stop pre-loading XP in January 2009 and HP was already in discussions with Microsoft about how it could push this deadline back.
It’s a good thing that Microsoft started their $300 million ad campaign to improve Vista’s image because it looks like businesses (biggest customers of Microsoft) are not planning to support Vista in near future. In fact, in a survey of 1.162 IT professionals done by King Research for KACE, 60 percent of the respondents said that they had no plans to deploy Vista at this time and 92 percent said Vista Service Pack 1 has not changed their plans for Vista deployment.
[Via APC Mag]