74% of Enterprise PCs Are Still Running Win XP

Microsoft recently announced that it had hit a huge milestone with Windows 7: they had sold 150 million copies. However, despite this success in the mainstream consumer market, the adoption rate among enterprise customers has been slow.

Microsoft this week revealed that the vast majority of businesses are still running on Microsoft's nine-year-old OS, Windows XP. Speaking yesterday at the Windows Partner Conference, Corporate Vice President of Windows, Tammi Reller, admitted that nearly three quarters (74 percent) of business PCs are still running XP. Reller also revealed that, at 4.4 years, the average age of a business PC is the highest it's ever been.

Though business adoption has been slow, things should look up soon if a recent study by Dimensional Research is to be believed. Back in April the firm conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 IT professionals and found worries about upgrading to Windows 7 had decreased while worries about maintaining Windows XP had increased.

The survey found that 87 percent of respondents planned to deploy Windows 7. This is compared to 47 percent who had plans to deploy Vista at a comparable point after its release. Further, 46 percent of the total surveyed revealed they had plans to migrate even before the release of SP1. Dimensional Research said that, while 25 percent of people expressed concerns about Windows 7 performance, this is down from 47 percent last year.

Although 60 percent of the respondents were worried about the cost and overhead of migrating to Windows 7, that figure was down from 72 percent last year. Similarly, 40 percent of the respondents said that they're worried about the hassles of maintaining Windows XP as it gets older. This figure is up from 28 percent last year.