Businesses mostly ignore XP hype

XP will capture the hearts and minds of the home market but is unlikely to attract corporates

www.it-analysis.com, VNU Business Publications 29 Oct 2001

Fanfare, news coverage, mass emailers, and even a mysterious soundtrack. XP has it all.

The question everyone wants answered, though, is will it really take off? To an extent, the answer is a foregone conclusion. Yes, XP will take off. Whether or not it will take off in the most critical enterprise space, however, is the really big question and already doubts are being aired.

According to Gartner, XP is likely to take a good while before it really takes a foothold in the business market at all. The firm reckons that the consumer market will, as ever thanks to preloaded OS bundles, see Windows XP as the dominant operating system on new PCs, taking about 82 per cent by 2002.

But the business market will see a more staggered adoption. By 2002 Gartner estimates that only 16 per cent of new business PCs will feature Windows XP Professional.

That, of course, is not likely to help Microsoft with its plans to take the high end. But it's hardly surprising.

As Gartner rightly notes, convincing any financial directors that there is a return on investment to be gained from upgrading to XP is going to very difficult indeed. But it would be foolish to buy new PCs with an older version of Windows.

This doesn't mean that Windows XP Professional isn't worth having, of course, because there are clear advantages in the system. Gartner notes that the increased stability of the system alone is a major improvement, but also warns that Windows XP Professional is really only an incremental improvement over Windows 2000 Professional.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that will arise from the release of XP is not Microsoft's fortunes at all. The interesting thing is whether its release will kick-start the faltering PC market.

The answer however, according to Gartner, is that it won't. The firm is predicting that PC shipments will decline by as much as 13 per cent in the final quarter of this year, compared with the same period in 2000, which rather suggests that XP won't have the great effect that the PC manufacturers might hope for.

It's not just because XP isn't a revolution, either. Gartner says that Microsoft simply doesn't have the hold on the PC market that it used to have, and for this reason the impact of XP will be lessened.

That means you won't see people rushing out in droves to replace twelve-month-old systems, but rather that XP will come in through a process of attrition, perhaps even using the back door, as old systems run out of steam.

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