The full extent of the flop that was the Vista operating system has been revealed thanks to new real-world PC usage data.

Exo.performance.network is a community-based monitoring tool that receives real-time data from about 10,000 PCs throughout the world, 25 percent of which are situated in larger business environments. The data is anonymised then aggregated to produce a wide range of reports on what PC owners actually use, providing an ongoing real-world snapshot of the state of Windows.

It shows that two years after Vista's release not even 30 percent of PCs actually run it. And those that do are almost exclusively the Home Premium version. This means that Vista is employed mainly by home users who likely got Vista preinstalled on a new PC and not by business users.

The data also shows that measurements of browser adoption by firms such as Net Applications are not giving a good picture of public Internet use. Because they don't measure internal browser traffic on company intranets. More than 85 per cent of these run Internet Explorer although Firefox is making some in roads.

Office 2007 is the dominant productivity suite for enterprise Windows users although OpenOffice.org is making inroads appearing on 13 percent of Windows PCs sampled by the exo.performance.network.

More here.