ZDNet's Ed Bott has assembled a database of information drawn from Dell's Outlet Center (full details on his methodology and results are available here). While small businesses definitely prefer Windows XP to Vista (70 percent to 30 percent), only 7 percent of consumers appear to be opting for Windows XP over Vista.
There's been a bit of a tussle over these numbers. PC World's Techlog recently published an article stating that by the end of its first year, Windows XP accounted for 36 percent of that site's users, while Vista accounts for only 14 percent today. Based on this evidence, the Techlog author concludes that Vista's adoption rate is much lower than XP's.
While Bott makes no statements regarding the current total number of XP users vs. the number of Vista users, he notes that while PC World's numbers are undoubtedly accurate, they reflect only the OS usage of people who visited PC World, not the entire consumer market. Regardless of what the current split is between XP and Vista, other evidence suggests that Vista is gaining market share over XP at an appreciable clip.
Consumers don't favor Vista but they get it anyway
Posted on Saturday, January 12 2008 @ 20:30 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck