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Half Of Businesses Still Use Windows 2000
bonch writes "An AssetMetrix study shows that half of business are still running Windows 2000 four years after the release of Windows XP, and that usage of Windows 2000 has only decreased by 4% since 2003. Microsoft will officially stop supporting Windows 2000 by the end of this month, offering one last update rollup later this year. Windows XP's slower adoption illustrates Microsoft's difficulty in competing with the popularity of its own software platform, and makes it more difficult for Microsoft to convince people to upgrade when Longhorn is released late next year."
I have not run into a compelling reason to upgrade from Win2k to XP. Win2k has been very stable for me. It seems that my XP boxes get more security patches than my Win2k boxes. I don't need all the eye candy of XP.
Certainly in the mass market. Why upgrade if you're not getting any significant benefit and possibly causing yourself huge amounts of grief?
Deleted
Most buisnesses have already bought Windows 2000, the cost of maintiaing it is equivalent to the cost of maintaining windows xp, so why would buisnesses upgrade to windows XP at an extra cost? We use Windows 2000 at our office and we dont think that upgrading to windows XP will increase our productivity.
The initial model of growth probably was that as buisnesses purchase and add NEW hardware, they will obivously prefer latest software. Now that PC penertration has into businesses has almost saturated, this model will no longer mean profitable buisness for microsoft.
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What happens when Longhorn comes out? It'll be five years old in a year, even though it's still the most up-to-date desktop OS that Microsoft offers (discounting Media Center Edition, 64-bit, etc.) I'm contemplating trying to convince my company to move to XP (from Windows 98) and support is one of the key selling points... so what happens when Longhorn comes out? You have a few months, and then you lose support if you're running anything less on a desktop?
A lot of the businesses they are talking about have site licenses. The major reason for keeping 2000 in most places is that converting hundreds of machines isn't an easy task. We finally just converted to XP at my job about 6 months ago, and the network is running much smoother. As long as we keep up on the patches we are pretty good. Since we are all behind massive firewalls, there isn't much to worry about anyway.
The same is true of most shops that run Unix. Or any major software such as Oracle for that matter. You need to wait until the release is stable, and you need to pick a time to convert when you'll get the most bang for your buck. Jumping in early rarely benefits your company. I'm a little surprised that 2000 is still that prevalent.
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If Microsoft is really interested in getting businesses to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Longhorn, then all they need to do is a couple of things. One make the upgrade procedure from 2K to Longhorn as smooth and painless as possible and two provide the upgrade at a very good price, like the cost of media or shipping or some other nominal fee. Seriously! If progress is being held up (or support is costing too much) then Microsoft needs to offer a deal that cannot be refused. It cost more to get new customers than to keep old ones. Besides, Office is where the real money is anyway, so keep em hooked by keeping them on Windows by making it a no brainer.
This is a lot of work for Microsoft programmers and designers to pull off and a lot of expense. But most of this work needs to be done anyway and in the long term it can only pay off for the company and for its customers. Longhorn is going to take a while to get here, so they might as well make it worth the effort.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Here is a list of the new features in XP. Notice the use of words like "Enhanced, Improved, Greater, Easier" -
.NET Platform
For the life of me, I can't figure out why anybody would consider moving thousands of workstations to XP. The only thing I can come up with is the built in firewall which can be controlled via group policy.
User interface improvements? Big deal, so now it looks like nintendo. Better help? Users call the help desk. 64 bit? Big deal...
-Intelligent User Interface
-Comprehensive Digital Media Support
-Greater Application and Device Compatibility
-Enhanced File and Print Services
-Improved Networking and Communications
-Integrated Help and Support Services
-Improved Mobile Computing
-Reliability Improvements
-Stronger Security Protections
-Easier Manageability
-64-Bit Support
-Looking Forward: The Microsoft
On our network of fifty users, we are staying with Windows 98 Second Edition for the near future; Win98 doesn't suffer from most of the worm and trojan activity that affects Win2000 and WinXP. Also, for our purposes, Win98SE Just Works.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
It has to be released then according to MS: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default .mspx
Check out the table. Notice how the licencing end dates run out at the end of this year for OEMs and next year for system builders? Longhorn has to fill that spot or the contracts need to be renegotiated.
WinXP is laid out all screwy too, makes it really hard to configure or use. I don't think it's any more stable either. Also, the "eye candy" you refer to is absolutely garish - it's like they got a retarded monkey to try to imitate Mac OSX. First thing I did on my work computer (which is XP unfortunately) was switch the style to classic to save my eyes and some of my sanity.
In my school district, we have probably a half a dozen machines running 98, and even a couple running 95. We also have a majority OS 9 Macs, as well as a handful of OS 8 and a smattering of OS 7's. Microsoft, and the rest of the big companies, are in the "Technology Forcing" business. Our machines work, and, barring some miraculous thing people can't live without like teleportation or FTL quantum communication, will continue to do so for many, many years to come. I will only "upgrade" when absolutely forced to.
With the eye-candy disabled, XP is just a more up-to-date Win2K - just as stable/unstable really.
The interesting thing is - what % of businesses are XP? Even if MS get some of the Win2K people to go to XP - how are they going to get the XP people to go to Longhorn? It isn't going to happen extensively!!! MS are actually possibly more screwed (at least in terms of getting people to Longhorn) if they get Win2K people to go to XP at this stage.
And it's still long time to wait for direct Win2K -> Longhorn upgrades (2 years? More? -including evaluation/install time for businesses).
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As far as I know to date there have been two versions of Windows that have basically been OK. Win2K and Windows NT 3.5.1. I can't imagine why anyone would want to move from Win2K (which works) to XP (which doesn't mostly). Also (which MS tends to forget) lots of software written for Windows (particularly stuff which businesses developed in house or using small suppliers) tends to be very specifically tied to a particular version of Windows. (Example I'm currently re-writing an application that only runs on NT4. Not 2K, not XP, just NT4. Its used by the company I work in on roughly 4200 machines in roughly 350 different buildings and is central to the business. Porting it is not a trivial undertaking particularly since we don't have the source code). This is the irony of Microsoft's repeated attacks on Java. They went after it because the spotted that it removed vendor level lock in which they saw (probably quite rightly) as a threat to their Windows franchise. But now that same lock in is actually at least as much as a threat to the same cash cow.
I work for a large international company and we're still using Win95. We see no reason to change. Many of our PCs are used for basic Office apps and Unix terminal emulation. We're not connected to the Internet so we see no reason to spend thousends of pounds replacing the 486s running Win95. At ~£1000 per base unit and over 4,000 units it's £4,000,000 we just don't need to spend.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I can definitely see why companies still want to use Win2k over XP. Windows 2000 is simply better suited for corporate use. It does not have any particularly distracting eye candy (think color blue) and just seems to have the best useful-to-crap features ratio of all the MS operating systems. I remember when our network was windows-based, I had the servers running 2k, and we just got a couple of P4 machines (when they first came out) preinstalled with XP home. It was a hell of a time getting those things fully working with the rest of the network. We ended up having to downgrade those machines (fun with xp-only drivers there!) because Home edition just wouldn't do what we wanted.. this is say that those copies of Home were just money wasted. XP just has a bunch of useless stuff built into it that has no place in a corporate environment. Win2k is really the least of the many evils.
Now I have the servers running Linux and even still, XP machines have problems playing nice with the samba shares. Win2k works fine, however. Go figure.
I like Windows XP. However, I just don't understand why they did some of the things that they did with it.
1. MSN Messenger auto running. Sure in a corp environment you can just have it disabled but it's annoying for small businesses that just don't have the IT resources to do it.
2. OS popups. Notifications above the tray that bring you the most inane messages ever. Try plugging in a USB2 device into a system that only has USB1.1 and follow the popup's instructions. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? I'm sure this is from MS's "usability" group that brought us Clippy and Search Mutt.
3. Window pane focus changes. This one I just don't understand. In 2k, if I open Windows Explorer in folder view, I can use the scroll wheel to scroll the pane that the mouse is over. In XP, I have to click the pane first to scroll. This probably doesn't affect many people but for those that it does, it is super annoying.
Since 2k still works for most people, I can see why XP would have such a problem replacing it.
Most shops probably upgraded to win2k less than three years ago. While there is significant feature for the home user to use XP over 2k, for a business that has an IT dept, there are no compelling reasons to switch. The few minor things that XP has like CD burning or remote assist, are already handled by some third party app on 2k. A 2Ghz+ is not going to feel any slower than a 3Ghz+ when just using office apps.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
"Windows 95 and Windows 98 were reduced from a collective 28% to less than 5%;
Windows NT popularity was reduced from 13.5% to about 10%; and
Windows XP became the most popular operating system for companies with fewer than 250 PCs."
I don't think ME was ever popularly deployed in businesses. I shudder to think about it. Win2k was available then.
Does the development of a Win2K clone called ReactOS have any bearing on this discussion? (And is ReactOS genuinely a Win2K clone? I can't find links on their website to pin this part down.)
A GPL clone of the software that Microsoft no longer supports would allow internal fixing of broken things -- as long as the clone correctly runs the software in use.
Push for legislation requiring software vendors such as Microsoft release the source code of software that they no longer support.
While they'll bitch and moan, you'll have tons of programmers on the side who'd be chomping at the bit to supply support for legacy systems/OSes.
Hell, I imagine that for the most part, you have the potential to rebuild a good deal of the computer industry, just by fixing holes in old MS products, etc, that MS in turn would save a fortune in no longer having to support.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Make that not knowing their customers' customers.
While it may be fine for a Microsoft customer (Don't laugh. So its like a Mafia customer. They make them an offer...) like Dell to sell all the machines with XP pre-installed we (a Dell customer to the tune of several 10K units per year) just strip that puppy off the machine and install a plain vanilla Win2k from a CD because its absolute murder on the software when something changes.
If the OS changes and breaks something in our software, its a lot tougher and more expensive for us to fix (when its even possible. We probably won't be able to rehire the same team and most of the, uh, interesting documentation was done by osmosis.)
Microsoft's XP can sit on the shelf 'till the Longhorn cows come home.
Win2K is curently fine. We wouldn't even have gotten off NT4.0 if they hadn't 'end-of-life'd it. It did what was required and stayed out of the way.
If that hurts Microsoft's pocket book, maybe they should get into the toy business.
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Windows 2000 is one of their best platforms. It performs ok, and is more stable than anything they have previously put out. The only reason they would stop support for it is so that they can FORCE people to make unnecessary upgrades, and get more money.
The fact that usage has only dropped by 4% shows that their customers still want to use it. I would think they would do a better job of doing what their clients want.
This seems like a bad move.
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Yes, I've had to do this a number of times, actually. But one problem is, after you read off the long code over the phone to them, you may or may not get an activation key back.
I'm not quite sure what the limitations are, but Microsoft obviously has measures in place to limit the number of times someone can re-activate XP that way. I've had customers who radically changed and upgraded their PCs a number of times over the last few years. When they had a drive crash and no good backups, it was up to me to swap out their drive and re-install XP and their apps from scratch. Their key refused to activate again, because apparently, MS decided it had been re-activated too often already and they put some kind of "block" on the code.
Where I work, some of the equipment still uses Windows 95 and 98. The equipment stands alone much like a point of sale cash register. If the vendor wants to provide an upgrade at a steep price that is viewed by a business as not needed, then the "it is not broken, don't fix it" reasoning is used. Why spend the money. It works.
Most of the desk workstations where I work do run Win2K It's what came with them and the license is corporate wide. It isn't broken (If you don't count annoyances such as IE and BSOD's as breakage) why fix it. The fix (XP) is not free of the problems the current version has. It just crashes less often. In additon it comes with it's own set of new problems such as applications that won't run properly on it.
The truth shall set you free!
We had licenses for all the machines, but reactivating 10 times a week got old very fast (especially for the test machines, which were rebuilt in different configurations and reimaged constantly).
They explicitly do not want you rebuilding / reloading machines on a regular ongoing basis as a consumer of their operating system.
- They want you to buy a machine with the XP installed already, and only use it just the way the machine was equipped and configured from the vendor. After all you agreed to that when you accepted the license.
- If you change your machine's hardware, they want to consider that to then be a different machine, and hence, a need for you to buy a new license for it. The reason is so that they can sell more licenses.
- If you wish to be in the regular habit of constantly changing hardware around they desire you to buy a new machine each and every time configed with that specific set of hardware you desire, and of course a new O/S license on each and every one. The reason is so that the computer makers (e.g. Dell, HP, etc) can sell more hardware and MS can sell more licenses.
- MS wishes ultimately to force an end to the "do-it-yourselfer" hobbiest computer builder, to make all home consumers of computers buy them only from commercial computer makers in rigidly fixed sets of hardware configurations and also put an end to the corporations who build and maintain their own hardware in house... all in the name of propping up commerce for Dell/HP/etc, and of course themselves. In their minds, when your current computer hardware breaks, or if you would like to change out / upgrade some of your hardware , then if you don't buy a whole machine from a system vendor, then you are "stealing business" from such vendors.