News brief: Enterprise adoption of Vista still slow

Here's an interesting bit of news for those of you developing applications in (or for) the Enterprise space. According to October 2007 Gartner research published by InformationWeek, Windows Vista is installed on just 0.9% of all Enterprise PCs. That compares to projections in 2006 that suggested it would exist on 6% of PCs by this time- off by a factor of 6! The research also revealed that businesses have delayed their Vista deployment plans nine to twelve months past their 2006 projections. If we assume those plans don't suffer additional delays, it's reasonable to believe fewer than 10% of Enterprise PCs will have Vista by then end of next year. Additional Gartner research backs that up.

Why do I bring this up and how does it relate to Telerik? For the better part of a year, developers have been struggling with the decision to build new Windows apps with WinForms or WPF. While both are viable platforms on the dominant XP operating system, WPF is not guaranteed to be installed and the hardware of an XP machine may not be able to take advantage of WPF's modern architecture. Even under those conditions, if Vista's adoption were taking off and businesses were quickly ushering in the era of accelerated graphics and WPF, it might make more sense to charge ahead with the new platform and say goodbye to your WinForms years.

But Vista isn't taking off at expected speeds. Even the impending SP1 is not garnering the reaction that past SP1s have brought to new versions of Windows. That means as developers there is a lot of life left in WinForms development, and even a lot of good reason to wait a while longer before beginning WPF development.

I bring this all up, of course, because Telerik has the full toolbox of controls for your WinForms development that enables you to deliver those next gen, "WPF-like" UIs in WinXP without waiting on Vista to arrive or hardware to be upgraded. That frees you from worrying about the platform and hardware while enabling you to build modern looking applications. And when the time really arrives for mainstream WPF development (maybe with Windows 7?), Telerik's RadControls for WPF (coming in 2008) will be there to make the transition easy. Just some news and ideas to keep in mind as you enter a new year and begin finalizing your development plans for 2008.