A new survey conducted by Dimensional Research shows that five out of six IT professionals don’t plan to upgrade to Windows 7 when the new OS is released sometime next year, and slightly fewer of the same respondents say they won’t upgrade to Vista at all, and will go directly to Windows 7 instead when they do their next upgrade. The survey was conducted among a variety of small, medium and large corporations and included IT professionals, IT managers and IT executives.

Some IT professionals expressed the concern that Windows 7 is just a revamped Windows Vista because Windows 7 is being built on Vista code. One of the issues that has plagued Windows Vista is the system’s memory usage. Another downside: the absence of software drivers.

Nearly three out of four respondents in the same survey said that they would be more concerned about upgrading to Windows 7 than they would be about staying with Windows XP, despite the fact that XP is outdated and no covered under Microsoft’s primary technical support. Microsoft says it will provide per-incident support on Windows XP through 2014, and will continue to patch the XP product indefinitely.

Home Users Take Vista, Business Users Stay Put

Home users have warmed up to Vista a bit, but Microsoft’s target market – the business users – remain cool to the ideal of upgrading, especially since Windows 7 is right around the corner. In terms of business computers, Windows Vista is operational on less than 10 percent of the deployed business machines. The company received strong pushback from Windows XP users, and agreed to continue selling licenses for the older XP product for a year after Vista had been available. Major manufacturers, including Dell, shipped Vista only as a customer option until XP licenses were no longer available, began offering Linux operating systems as a option to Vista.

The first Service Pack release for Vista, introduced in February, did resolve some of the performance issues. Microsoft is testing a second Service Pack release that it plans to make it publicly available sometime in the second quarter of ’09.

The company is also testing Windows 7 though it’s not clear that a solid release can help the company recapture some of its lost market share. In April ’07, when Microsoft debuted Vista, it held about 93 percent of the OS market; today that figure has shrunk to 88 percent. In addition to the market share slide, nearly 65% of XP users are still holding off on upgrading to Vista, more than two years after its initial release. Less than one-quarter of Windows users upgraded to Vista and the remaining 10%-12% of Windows users are sticking with products that pre-date XP.

Photo Credit: Microsoft