Being involved in the IT industry, this is a question I am involved with and get asked rather frequently, so I felt compelled to express my views on this issue when I came across this topic.

Since its release, Vista has faced a double whammy of major issues that have led to slow or non-existent adoption by businesses. The first is the fact that the system's design and function is really geared toward someone that will be willing to move to a complete new set of applications that is designed to take advantage and work well within the Vista operating system. The second is that the changes provided by Vista have really not been compelling enough to force the hand of businesses. Let's take a detailed look at each of these two points.

Vista's main inroad into the desktop market to date has really been the personal user, driven in large part by the fact that it is almost impossible to find a PC for sale at most consumer sources that is loaded with anything but Vista. On the business side, due to the uproar of business users everywhere, that move has not yet been, and I feel probably never will be, made. While a home user may be content, or even excited, to repurchase their small list of key applications to accommodate the new operating system, it is neither desirable, nor in most cases remotely possible for most businesses to do so. Especially in the current global economic climate, no business will look to rip and replace major portions of their computing infrastructure to accommodate a new OS.

There are still significant compatibility issues with Vista even with Microsoft's own applications. For example, Outlook Web Access, the web client used by organizations that run Microsoft Exchange to allow their employees to access e-mail over the web has known issues with allowing Vista users to reply to messages. When key applications, such as e-mail, do not work well or at all, how can one expect business users to line up for that? If Microsoft apps have issues, what about the companies that have legacy apps that are five, ten, twenty or even more years old? What hope do they have of getting their critical apps to work reliably in Vista?

All the issues mentioned above might be overlooked if the second point was not present. If Vista provided some significant gains in productivity, functionality or capability, CIOs might be able to make the argument to senior management that the investment in replacing or rewriting apps along with the OS would

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