A senior executive at Hewlett Packard has said that sales of machines supporting Windows XP are still making up the majority of sales despite the official withdrawal of XP from sale in June.
Jane Bradburn, market development manager of commercial notebooks for HP said the company is still selling XP machines while issuing a Vista license for them, colouring Microsoft’s claims that Vista is selling well.
Ms Bradburn said: "From June 30, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with an XP license, however, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business license but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."
As a result the sale of each machine would appear to be a sale of a Vista package notwithstanding the fact it might never be installed.
Rob Kingston, group manager of commercial product marketing for Hewlett Packard said: “I don't think businesses will see much value in upgrading to Vista until late next year and, even so, Microsoft will probably have come out with something else by then."
Forrester Research estimates that only 8.8 percent of businesses have adopted Vista.