Altiris and Gartner at odds on Windows Vista acceptance

Steve Morton, vice president of product management and marketing for IT consultancy Altiris, echos that sentiment. "I think we'll see an uptake immediately. I don't have a really good sense of how this will compare with XP, but I can definitely say there is a pent-up interest. We've been talking about it for a year now."

Altiris services a mostly technical community, which has been following the Vista betas carefully. "They like the security features, the productivity features, [and that] it's organized differently and geared for information discovery," he said

However, Michael Silver, research director with Gartner, is sticking to his conservative estimates that real deployments won't begin until at least 2008, and he says it's not entirely Microsoft's fault. "The ecosystem really isn't as ready as it could be. Things like devices, applications, device drivers, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be supported, and a lot of the ecosystem didn't think Microsoft was going to meet their dates, so a lot of them aren't really ready," he said.

Read more…