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The role reversal has started. Some enterprises are upgrading Windows XP to Vista, rather than downgrading to XP from Vista.




Yes, you read that right. The enterprise gloom hanging over Vista may yet lift. But Forrester Research's weather forecast is based on a few months of trended data. The winds may be shifting, but those dark clouds of negative Vista perceptions hang low overhead.

Still, Microsoft can use any good news about Windows Vista, and a new Forrester report has got some. The long-winded title: "Corporate Desktop Operating System Trends, Q4 2007 Through Q2 2008: Windows Vista Deployments Are Finally Ramping Up, While Mac Continues Its Slow March on the Enterprise." The analyst firm monthly surveyed more than 50,000 enterprise end users from 2,500 organizations to compile the operating system trends.

"A new trend has emerged," writes report author Benjamin Gray. "Windows Vista migrations are now coming from Windows XP machines, which is a shift from when Forrester previously reported on these desktop OS trends." He emphasized that "the earliest adopters were mostly limited to Windows 2000 shops that were finally replacing their aging hardware with the newer Windows Vista OS preinstalled."

But earlier Forrester data also showed percentage growth gains of three-to-one to Windows XP compared with moves to Vista from Windows 2000. So there's a dark lining to this silver cloud. Windows 2000 migrations to Vista may be subsiding, but XP got more of them.

source: Microsoft Watch