Users Slow to Adopt Windows Vista

I've been hankering to upgrade SpamButcher's primary spam filter software development box. It's an old Pentium 4 Dell running at 2.6 MHZ with 1.5MB RAM. Not super slow, but not state of the art either.

To avoid doing upgrade after upgrade, I've decided to wait on upgrading the hardware until it was appropriate to move to Windows Vista. This way I can just buy a nice, new fast computer with Vista pre-installed.

Of course, I don't want to start developing on Windows Vista until a good chunk of existing and potential users of our antispam solution are also running it. At this point, I'd rather miss a bug unique to Vista than a bug unique to XP.

Once Vista hits 40% penetration - it makes sense to shift our focus. So just how long will I have to wait until upgrading my system?

So, about 5% of visitors are currently using Windows Vista. For comparison, Windows 2000 continues to chalk up about 5%. While I can't say for sure that visitors to www.spambutcher.com are totally representative of the general computing public, I suspect that they mostly are.

The trend seems to be moving upward at a rate of a bit under 1% a month - but it may be accelerating. Unless the pace picks up substantially - it could be several years until I can rationalize buying a new development computer.

While Microsoft claims Vista sales are wonderful, license sales are not the same as copies in use.

This article suggests that XP's penetration rate was between 12 and 14 percent at the end of 12 months. Based on current trends, my best guess is that Vista will be lucky to make it to 10% by its 1 year anniversary on January 30th, 2008.

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