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Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel surveyed 50,000 enterprise customers and discovered that only 8.8% of corporate PCs are running Vista.

Mendel suggested that firms that hadn't already made the jump should "consider following the lead of Microsoft's important partner Intel and re-evaluate the case of Vista."

The report provoked an unusually spiky response on the official Windows Vista team blog, which accused Forrester of failing to understand the market.

"This report doesn't reflect the normal enterprise OS adoption cycle," thr blog claims. "Enterprise adoption of OSes has always been much slower than consumer adoption. After all, upgrading the PC in your living room is easy, but upgrading an entire

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front- and back-end infrastructure to thousands of users without downtime is much more complex, and that takes time."

It then goes on to accuse Forrester of being "schizophrenic", having urged businesses to upgrade to Vista earlier this year. "What is even more puzzling is that Mr Mendel's report directly contradicts another Forrester report titled, 'Building the Business Case for Windows Vista,' which was written by fellow analyst Ben Gray," the blog states.

"This report outlines the five main reasons why enterprises should start their company's migration to Windows Vista now."

Finally, it accuses Forrester of sensationalism. "Given that there's a mountain of evidence to refute this report - including multiple reports from Forrester and other top-tier analysts - this appears to be more focused on making sensationalist statements, rather than offering a thoughtful industry perspective, based on conversations with IT operations professionals or deep knowledge of enterprise deployment cycles.

"How is this useful guidance to customers? It's disappointing to see such a respected organisation like Forrester take this approach," it concludes.

The Forrester attack is another sign of Microsoft's newfound resolve to stick up for Vista, after 18 months of Apple attacks and negative press. Vista marketing manager Brad Brooks said earlier this month that the "sleeping giant" had "woken up" and was "ready to take our message forward".