Analysts predict five-year uptake of Vista

Analysts have predicted that it could take five years for Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista to reach 84 per cent of the market.

IDC analyst Al Gillen has said that he expects Vista to take as long as XP did to reach the same point. Indeed, many other industry analysts have said that they feel Vista is performing as expected in terms of the rate of uptake.

In May, Microsoft announced that it had shipped 40 million copies of the operating system, however, it did not clarify how many of those copies where sold to PC manufacturers and how many were sold as upgrades. Analysts predict that around 15 million copies may have been upgrades.

Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder recently estimated just over 12 million US consumers would have Vista installed by the end of the years. However, he did note that this would only represent a small fraction of the 235 million PCs in the country.