Microsoft fighting cognitive lock-in as users hold on to XP
It's often said that the greatest competitive threat to a new Microsoft OS release is the collective weight of all the past iterations of Windows. After all, if someone has a stable installation that he or she is happy enough with, why switch? Redmond has usually gotten around the inertia by ensuring that new machines ship with the newest OS, which ensures that the company's latest and greatest shows up on more machines as older hardware gets replaced. But indications from a variety of sources suggest that Vista is facing more resistance than usual when it comes to preinstalled sales.
A further indication may come from InfoWorld, which suggests that over a third of what it terms "enterprise class" users are exercising the downgrade option. InfoWorld provides a performance monitoring tool, called Sentinel, that reports in with data about a system's configuration and operation, allowing the community to analyze the data and detect trends. The InfoWorld staff combed the data for hardware that's new enough to have shipped after Vista had been preinstalled, and found that 35 percent of it was actually running XP.
