If you’re younger than 35, (or if you were asleep during the mid-80s), some explanation is required.
Coca Cola decided in about 1985 that the formula for its flagshipdrink was a little dated, so it started shipping “New Coke,” which wentover like a lead balloon.
So it scrapped New Coke and then started packaging old Coke underthe label Coca Cola Classic. A Forrester Research analyst has comparedWindows Vista to New Coke.
Eric Lai of Computerworld US wrote this report.
Fewer than one in eleven of the PCs being used in large or very large enterprises runs Windows Vista, according to survey results released Wednesday by Forrester Research Inc.
Of the 50,000 enterprise users surveyed by the Cambridge, Mass.analyst firm, 87.1 per cent were still running Windows XP at the end ofJune, compared to 8.8 per cent for Vista. According to author ThomasMendel, that implies that the majority of PCs upgraded to Vista werethose running older versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 or 98.
“Vista is ‘new Coke,’” Mendel wrote, comparing Microsoft’s flagshipOS to the ill-fated soft drink. Enterprises still on the fence aboutVista would be wise, he said, to “consider following the lead ofMicrosoft’s important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case ofVista.”
Mendel’s comments undercut the momentum for Vista claimed byMicrosoft, which says it has sold 180 million licenses for its18-month-old operating system to PC makers and end users.
Vista still has double the share of Macs among big businesses,however. The share of Macs grew from to 4.5 per cent in June from 3.7per cent in January 2008. Eighty per cent of those are Intel-basedMacs.
Linux’s share of desktops, meanwhile, fell significantly, accordingto Forrester, to 0.5 per cent in June from 1.8 per cent in January.
As a result, enterprise application developers only need to “developexclusively for Windows XP and Vista. Forget about Macs unless you’reaiming at a specific business vertical where Mac use is prevalent.”
Forrester’s study examined the Web browser as well as the desktopenvironments of the 50,000 users, spread out among 2,300 companies. Itfound that 19.4 per cent of enterprise users are using FireFox, up from16.8 per cent at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, MicrosoftInternet Explorer’s (IE’s) share only slipped slightly, from 79.1 percent in January to 77.6 per cent at the end of June.
“At least make sure that applications work on Firefox as well as IE — this is a must,” Mendel wrote.
Apple Inc.’s Safari owns only a small slice of the market — 2.4%, according to Forrester.
Both Flash and Java were nearly ubiquitous. Flash Player version 9was on 97 per cent of desktops, while Java was on 99.9 per cent ofthem. But application developers shouldn’t try too hard to jazz uptheir apps with Flash elements — “business users don’t want to hunt fornavigation nor do they crave excitement,” Mendel wrote.
Forrester also discovered that despite ever-increasing screens andscreen sizes, the largest slice — 34.1 per cent — of business users areusing screens between 15 and 17 inches in size with resolutions of 1024by 768 pixels; another 25.2 per cent use screens between 17 and 19inches in size with resolutions of 1280 by 1024 pixels.