More than half (58 percent) of the companies that use technology from Microsoft, are persisting with Windows XP, compared to only 4 percent of Vista, according to research at Corporate IT Forum (TIF). TIF also found that 35 percent of organizations as “not interested” in Vista.

Operating System (OS) that most people like to count on or develop is XP, making a comparison of 12 percent of companies using XP with five percent of Vista. Several companies (30 percent) said they will consider and review the next Microsoft operating system, Windows 7, Vista (14 percent). In contrast, seven percent of companies said they are still in the operating system, Windows 2000 or 19 per cent stated that they are into replacing or “sunsetting” it.

In April, the study revealed that Vista had a low adoption rate throughout 2007, but a quarter of businesses stated for a possible upgrade to Vista in 2008. The main reason deemed behind slowed moving to Vista is lack of business need and requirements.

The current version of Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), is also facing a similar adoption struggle for recognition; with one fifth of respondents said they were not yet interested in the application.

Almost two thirds of the companies surveyed (65 percent) indicated that they had IE6 in operation, compared with four percent for IE7. However, 14 said that it is running Internet Explorer 7, the same proportion in isolation. Nearly a quarter (23 percent) said they analyze and investigate IE8, is currently in beta.

These stats show that either Microsoft has failed to ascertain the needs of its customers or they are hitting the market with a combination premature and over-mature products which either don’t fit well with the customers or with the hardware .. and sometimes with both.

It didn’t take me more than a minute to click and download the toolbar. It took a while to install it, because, I suppose, because I didn’t have SilverLight installed and the toolbar is “Powered by SilverLight”. It was worth the wait though; I fell in love with the MSN Toolbar at first sight. It looked so glossy and pleasantly animated that it made the Google Toolbar look like the one from Stone Age. Have a look at the graphic below:

It makes Google toolbar so out of fashion, doesn’t it? And from all it looks it proves to be coming straight from Windows Live family. It fits so well with Windows Vista and IE and also with Windows Live services like Live Mail to make those services a pleasure to use.
Finally the weather feature looks so awesome, so useful and makes your day even brighter. It works in a way pretty similar to weather widget in Vista where user can change his desired weather location. Other toolbar functions, however, lack such customization. User can change the look and feel of the toolbar by changing colors scheme but there’s no feature like “custom buttons”. But it’s not much useful of features anyway.
Would’ve loved if they could introduce a website ranking meter like Google’s flagship PageRank to create some more fuss from nothing, for nothing, like folks at Google did! Keeping inventing Microsoft, you rock!