It has been difficult, through all the marketing spin, to determine what has actually been happening in the enterprise with Windows Vista. Microsoft claims strong sales numbers and rosy outcomes, naysayers counter these, and I, personally, am not familiar with any large organization that has deployed a single copy of the operating system in production yet. It's hard to know what to believe.

Forrester now steps in with some numbers and a prognosis for Vista deployment: it's not here, but it's coming. In 2008, says analyst Benjamin Gray, one-third of enterprise IT departments will begin full-scale deployments of Vista. As Gray points out, such deployments are often multi-year affairs and it's not clear how many will actually be completed in 2008 or in fact how much progress will be made at all, despite the recent push from Microsoft to put out better deployment tools and get the all-important Service Pack 1 out the door.

All this together reflects a more or less prudent approach to upgrading and so probably shouldn't be too surprising. More interesting are the current figures for operating system deployments: Forrester puts it at 84% for Windows XP and 11% for Windows 2000. If my calculator is working properly then that leaves just 5% for "other" which would seem to have to include Linux, OS X, and Vista... while this doesn't contradict Microsoft's sales numbers directly, it certainly puts a damper on the idea that corporations have been dying to roll out Vista.