CDW has repeated a survey done last November to track Windows Vista adoption. You can download the report for the cost of your e-mail address. Some key findings:
The top percieved benifits are:
- Improved Security (78%)
- Improved Performance (56%)
It’s pretty interesting to me that people think Vista will run faster than their current OS considering the increased hardware requirements for Vista. I also notice that people don’t seem to think that Vista will be great at supporting open standards (or don’t care if it will).
Key concerns:
- Expect bugs in first release (52%)
- Current OS meets today’s needs (40%)
- Benefits of Vista not clear enough (38%)
- Hardware requirements are too excessive (37%)
It’s also interesting that a top concern isn’t hardware and application compatibility. Also, price didn’t come up as a top reason for avoiding Vista.
Compare that with the perceptions of open source, which Richard recently commented on.
Benefits ranked as important:
- Supporting open standards (78%)
- Use without restrictions (76%)
- Avoid vendor lock-in (79%)
- Free (62%)
It interesting that security and performance didn’t come up as a key benefit of open source. It also seems that “free” as in “freedom” really is more important than “free” as in “cost”. Now let’s look at the open source concerns:
- Availability of service and support (74%)
- Security of software (57%)
- Lack of internal skills in development or operations (54%)
- Product immaturity (52%)
To summarize, and informal roundup of the consensus is that Vista is secure and fast, but buggy and a hardware hog. It’s also seems that people running XP feel it’s good enough and that Vista doesn’t offer anything that makes it a must have. This is a typical impression of closed source software. Often the main competitor for a new version is the previous version. New versions are suspect until the first major patches have been released, and new versions are typically seen as bloated.
For open source, it will do things in an industry standard way, and you’ll have freedom to use and distribute as you see fit, but people are concerned about support, security, and maturity.
In neither model were backward compatibility or software cost seen as the main issues.
