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Companies 'Blah' About Vista
PreacherTom writes "Those who expected the initial Vista release to generate a wave of hype will be sorely disappointed. While Vista is now available for companies, they do not really appear to care. The situation is the same with Office 2007. Why? Several reasons, not the least of which is expected difficulty in adaptation to the new features." From the article: "Office has an entirely new look and new formats for saving files in Word and Excel. Slick as it is, the new look will take some training to master. And the new file formats, which will be easier to use with high-end corporate programs such as those that run servers, mean users on older versions of Office will have to download a program to open documents and spreadsheets sent with the new technology. 'This thing is not going to be all that easy to roll out,' says Michael Silver, research vice-president at Gartner."
Better centralized management tools. Improved security model. Mostly, the changes affect infrastructure management as opposed to end-user experience. Oh, yeah, the big one: 64-bit support, which is not needed for typical office applications, but is an absolute must for companies moving their CAD workstations to Windows. CATIA V5, for example, fully supports the 64-bit Vista architecture right now.
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Though with Windows 2000 in extended support phase since June of this year, there are probably a number of larger corporations that skipped Windows XP and plan to go from 2000 to Vista.
The ability to push down many, many more settings via Active Directory in a Vista AD setting. For example, you can now set the power profile options via AD where as before you had to set them on each individual machines. (This was an issue at one office where I worked where the default power profile for the machines from the factory was for them to go into sleep mode after 10 minutes of inactivity, which also timed out their connections to the AS400's, causing us to have to log in to the AS400 and reset their connections.)
That's just one example, and the majority of the new settings are more security oriented I believe, but anything that allows us, the admins, to remotely exercise greater system control via AD policies is a very good thing.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
in 2 years after Vista release
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223
This is great news for XP owners, after this 2 year period is ended they WILL release a hotfix / patch to remove the ACTIVATION requirement for XP.
They have stated this here.. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302878
"Does Microsoft use activation to require me to upgrade? Will Microsoft ever stop issuing activation codes for one or more of the products that require activation?
No. Microsoft does not use activation as a tool to require people to upgrade. Activation is only an anti-piracy tool.
Microsoft will also support the activation of Windows XP and will likely provide an update that turns off activation at the end of the product's life cycle so that users would no longer have to activate the product. "
ENJOY VISTA by waiting for the XP activation REMOVAL patch in 2 years!!!
I've been using RTM since it came out via MSDN and I just don't see the need to upgrade from XP to Vista except for a few limited cases.
Overall:
Pluses -
Bitlocker might be a great solution to keep stolen laptops from causing so much damage.
Built in apps for managing photos and your calendar are nice to have.
Built in Search works well.
Backup and Restore are nice if you can afford the "right" version of Vista.
Windows Meeting space is neat.
Windows Update now just a small app that runs locally.
Firewall does both ways and is much improved.
Cons -
If you own a CRT Vista may not be for you. Fonts are designed specifically for LCD only use. Yuck!
Aero adds literally nothing to the user experience, waste of cpu and gpu cycles.
Slower gaming than XP until DX10 cards and games become common a while from now.
They changed the file system layout for no reason, ie no more "My Documents".
High system requirements with little payoff.
You need 64bit to truly take adavantage of the new security measures.
New unproven network stack may be a huge mistake.
UAC , Everyone is just going to click "Allow" anyway so why bother?
Current Free 3rd party and MS apps for XP duplicate what Vista is offering. With Picasa, Google Desktop Search, WMP11, Windows Defender, etc all available why do we need Vista?
Overall this is not a necessary upgrade for the vast majority of XP users. A few years from now when developers really start taking advantage of the "under the hood stuff" you may have something. But until then home users should avoid upgrading unless there is a specific feature you feel to be must-have. I usually upgrade to every MS release when it comes out(well except for ME) but I find having to force myself to even boot into Vista.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Better centralized management tools.
Such as...?
Improved security model.
That has yet to be proven... If you recall, 2000, XP, and XP SP2 all claimed the same...
Oh, yeah, the big one: 64-bit support
There is a XP 64-bit version already...
I think the email I got from company IT support says it best, "While Windows Vista has many attractive new features, none represent a business imperative for [us] at this time."
Of course Companies arn't going to leap for it. I'm working for a big contractor in the UK and we have almost finished one of the largest rollouts in Europe (120,000 workstations) from Windows 2000 to XP for a government agency. The only reason they are moving over to XP is because Microsoft is stopping support for earlier versions of Operating system and business integration - such as Exchange 5.5 It doesn't seem to make sense to go for businesses first - companies are generally slow on the uptake when it comes to migration on a large scale.
I'm not sure exactly who but the "new car model year" mentality into software, but it's really annoying. For that matter, most Linux distributions seem to run by that model, too.
Then there's Gentoo Linux. (Ignore for a moment all the snarky remarks about waiting for it to compile, though maybe I'll come back to that, later.)
Gentoo does have releases, and the current one is 2006.1. But the releases just aren't that important. What's more important is keeping your software up to date and making sure that you get Gentoo Linux Security Advisories (GLSA) taken care of. Typically, if a system is kept properly up to date, changing a release level is a matter of changing 1 (/etc/make.profile->../usr/portage/profiles/...) symlink, and then checking that your packages are still up to date. It's about the least disruptive "revision update" ever seen, usually a non-event.
That said, other things happen along the way that can be more disruptive, like gcc and glibc (I still haven't done gcc-4.1 and glibc-2.4) migrations, monolithic to modular X, kernel 2.4 to 2.6, devfs to udev, etc. But even at that, these changes taken singly can be more easily managed than taking them all at once with a reinstall or upgrade.
As long as you don't let your system get too far behind, Gentoo Linux simply doesn't have the "new car model year" mentality.
Back to compiling. Yes, it's a pain, but I've never had fewer problems having things just work. The prerequisites were on my system, it compiled on my system, and aside from waiting for the compilations, it pretty much "just works." Back when I was running a binary/rpm based distribution I couldn't make that same claim. For the greatest part, the problems I've had have been with binary-distributed software, not source-distributed. (Exception, haven't been able to get Doomsday to work on amd64, but it's only officially distributed for x86 and ppc.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Vista has a lot of Business features - in fact, they probably have more biz features than consumer features.
BitLocker is a nifty tech that encrypts the system volume, needing a USB key to boot. I wonder how many businesses with (stolen!) laptops would love to have this feature.
Windows MeetingSpace uses the new network implementation in Vista to allow peer-to-peer detection of clients. Meaning you bring your WiFi laptop into a conference room and you're logged into MeetingSpace. The program itself lets you collaborate - you can share an open program and work on it simultaneously, or share your entire desktop, or what have you not.
Speech Recognition is built into the OS and in my experience, actually works pretty well. I can see a lot of secretaries, typing-deficient people, bosses, etc. appreciating being able to dictate to a computer. I can also see some liability disappear as businesses "cure" carpal tunnel and other repetitive strain nonsense.
User Account Control makes it completely possible to run as a standard user or to default to standard user privileges only even when logged into an admin account.
Windows Service Hardening uses the same changes in the Vista kernel that allow IE7 "protected mode" and UAC to function to run each Windows service under its own user. This means that viruses and the like will be unable to mess with the file system, registry, etc. by piggybacking onto a Windows service, because the special user account the service runs under simply won't have those priviliges.
The new Windows Driver Model and Code Integrity make the system more secure and stable. Unsigned drivers are no longer allowed to run in kernel mode. Instead, the kernel exports a set of interfaces used to program most drivers in user mode, meaning:
There's a bunch of other stuff, too, like Windows PowerShell that system admins are going to love (although they're releasing this for Windows XP SP2, also).
There's a lot of business features, most of them focusing on security and stability. (Vista also plays a lot nicer with Unix than XP does.) The question isn't whether there's any "business argument", but whether these features are worth the upgrade. For some businesses, they will be; for others, they won't.
DATABASE WOW WOW
...what does Vista do that XP doesn't?
Eliminates the incredibly annoying SPACE in the user's home-directory path:
C:\Documents and Settings\jafac -> c:\users\jafac
At long last.
For me, this is worth the price of the upgrade.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You do know that Microsoft has a Compatability Pack for Office 2000-2003, right? It adds support for the new formats.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks