Microsoft Corp."s biggest worry over Windows Vista shouldn"t be rival operating systems from Apple Inc. or Red Hat Inc., but remains competition from its own Windows XP, an analyst said Wednesday. "The big story isn"t that 32% of the companies we surveyed said that they would start Vista deployments by the end of next year," said Benjamin Gray, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "It"s that companies have been hugely successful in standardizing on Windows XP."
According to a survey of nearly 600 U.S. and European companies that have more than 1,000 employees, 84% of all their PCs now run Windows XP, up from 67% the year before. While XP may have peaked, Gray warned not to bet against the 6-year-old operating system. "There are plenty of companies looking forward to XP SP3," he said. That next hot-fix and patch rollup is to ship sometime in the first quarter of 2008, Microsoft has said, and it will reportedly be XP"s last service pack.