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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."
I mean, honestly - what does Vista do that XP doesn't? From a business standpoint, of course.
I could see end users getting much happier about Vista. New eye candy, DX10, and all that, but generally businesses don't care about such things.
What is Vista's business argument in the first place? Not trolling, just genuinely curious.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
How many companies will buy PCs with Vista Business EOM pre-installed, or buy the Vista Business OEM package, then exercise downgrade rights and put XP on them?
How many volume license owners will pay for a Vista license but install XP now and upgrade later, on THEIR timetable?
I bet quite a few.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I've posted this comment on another story recently, but it's just as relevent to this one.
0 53950
I work in a school, and as such we have an MS Schools License Agreement, which entitles us to all the latest Microsoft software for a reletively cheap price (I think £30ish a workstation).
We're expecting delivery of our Office 2007 and Vista discs in either the December or January licensing packs. While we may test them around the office, a network-wide deployment (about 350 machines total) of Vista won't even be considered till after SP1 is released. Not to mention all the poorly-written educational software that will need compatability testing on the new OS. Due to the training requirements of Office 2007 I probably can't see that being rolled out till 2008 at the earliest either - especially with the admin staff, since a lot of their applications tie directly into Office and they use it all day, ever day. The training requirements for that alone would cause so many headaches for us to support.
Many people I know who work at other schools in our area aren't even considering an upgrade yet or in the near future. XP works just fine for now and the forseeable future. My school is lucky in that we have a large IT budget and have mostly up-to-date PCs (enough for what they do on them anyway), other schools in my area are still running 333MHz/128MB RAM machines - not exactly the powerhouse needed to run Vista at a reasonable level.
I posted the original comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=209148&cid=17
That's simple - the only businesses that have access to it now include MSDN subscribers and members of their partner program. This means it primarily affects developers who are the ones typically interesting in early adoption; however, they really don't support much of their own development tools right now. They won't support Visual Studio 2005 until SP1 is released first quarter next year, they won't support Visual Studio 2003, 2002, or 6 at all (though they do support Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual FoxPro 9.0). You can read up on this yourself, of course.
No way. Only big companies can afford to move to OSS, unless one of the principals happens to be a geek. My small company (10 people) in no way, shape, or form could afford to move to OSS. It would instantly bankrupt us. No, that's not an exaggeration, and yes, we're quite profitable and debt free. But we can't afford to hire a staff of programmers to re-write our current applications (there are no OSS equivalents), and train the current IT staff (me, the owner) a whole new way of doing things.
That being said, I have no reason to use Vista. We're still using W2K and it's working just fine. But, if I had to buy Vista for some reason, I would do it with a smile, when I think of what the alternative is.
WHile the temptation to get the flamethrower out is pretty large, I am only going to say that, for a huge percentage of the American workforce, training IS a big hurdle. I spend a lot of my time getting folks introduced to new programs, and, I continually run up against the wall of "too hard to learn". I had a fellow the other day tell me that he did not want to switch from Internet Explorer to Opera because it is "too hard to learn a new browser". Right off the bat, I can't think of many other software tools with a LOWER learning curve than a browser. That, alas, is not all that unusual though. As another example, I know a company that still does all its invoicing on an antique pentium system running XENIX because it is too hard to move to more modern software. This ignores the fact that the newer software is actually EASIER to use than the ancient stuff on the XENIX box, and, is much more powerful.
dave mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
I've been using it for the last 6 months. Both my home machines now run it, as well as 2 of my 3 work machines.
:)
If i could think of one feature all by itself that makes upgrading Vista worthwhile on my home machines it is this one:
Per-Application Volume Control
Sounds ridiculous, right? in XP, turning up the volume in media player to hear that low-volume encoded movie got really irritating just about the time outlook told you that you got new mail, or a new IM contact signed in. The deafening "DING!@#$" was not appreciated.
The Vista volume applet gives you a separate slider (and MUTE!) for each application using the sound device.
The second thing I love:
Shell File operations are Less Dumb.
Every shell file oepration you might do - extracting files from a zip file, copying, moving, etc, now has its own separate window with minimize and close controls, and they show up on the task bar in explorer. Additionally, they don't block the UI painting of any other explorer windows. Essentially, the shell file management experience has become much less awful.
The Third Thing I Love:
Massive improvements to the VM system
VM system optimized for specific scenarios. Hibernate/resume are much faster than XP. The "lunch" scenario in vista is much better. The lunch scenario, breifly, is the phenomena where you walk away from an XP machine for 1 hour and then sit back down at it and it takes 10-45s for outlook to become usable. During this time there is massive disk thrashing as all of the pageouts get paged back in. Vista has gotten much smarter about paging and the laptop experience with Vista crushes Xp. Hibernate/resume is much improved, and sleep/wake on my antiquated Dell D600 (Vista Experience Index: 1.0) is at least as fast as OSX sleep/wake on my wifes ibook - by the time the lid is at the right viewing angle, the machine is ready.
Fourth Thing:
Media Center
Media Center in Vista isn't its own hard-to-get SKU, its included in the higher end home SKUs. Also, it supports ATSC tuners natively. It is easier to get fansubbed content working properly under MCE than it was on MCE2005 (not sure why, it just seems to be. Install CCCP and set Haali to auto-load VSFilter, and you are done). the music management stuff in MCE (and WMP11) are nicer than MCE05
Fifth Thing:
Asian Language Fonts
Ok, this isn't a big deal, but I appreciate it. Vista has Japanese and other east asian fonts ready to go out of the box. This means that when you get this weeks hottest J-Pop MP3s media player and friends don't draw a zillion empty box glphys - you get beautiful anti-aliased Kanji/kana. On XP installing the east asian fonts required access to the XP Cds and a reboot
Sixth Thing
Parental Controls
This isn't something I need to use currently, but I've looked at it a bit and it seems like a pretty good idea. the User Accounts stuff in vista has been redone so taht in non-domain joined machines, its more like "Family And Accounts Center". The idea is that everyone in your house gets a non-admin account, and on any non-admin account, the admin user can setup different parental type controls, including logging of IM conversations, web browsing history, etc etc. Obviously there are probably ways to circumvent this, but the distance between "zero" and what Vista gets you is pretty tremendous, and if technology companies don't start doing stuff to make this easy and effective for normal people, Legislators will, and it will be Bad(tm). Plus, it continues to push Windows to a multi-user, not-everyone-is-admin type model.
7th Thing
network locations
When you join a new network (be it wireless, wired, VPN, or whatever), you can specify what type of network it is (home, work, public place) and a bunch of settings (like filesharing, firewall permissiveness, etc) are set for you. Vista remembers networks you've been to befo
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
How many thousands of fonts could one possibly want in their documents?
I believe the argument to upgrade to the latest version of Office would be better made if they promised to not allow 10 pt Arial font ever!
True believers already know that 12pt Time New Roman is the only "TRUE" font.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
When the computer market was growing by leaps and bounds, the sheer number of new installs of the latest software would eventually push people to upgrade their own older office software. But now that the installed base of Office 97/2K/XP/2K3 is so huge, never mind all the other office suites that attempt to be compatible with the O2K formats, is this going to happen with whatever format Office 2007 uses?
I know that I'm not likely to be using Office 2007 for at least a few years, if ever, so until then, folks are just going to have to make sure they do a "save as" for me. I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone.
I don't really follow the Office 2007 file format news, is the new format the default format?
So on our network we wait until there is a function in the new software that our users need, or that makes things easier. Training isnt really a problem unless something drastic happens. I have even converted home/small business users to Open Office because all they really want to do is simple no-training-needed things. The only time training is going to be a hurdle is if you are moving to something TOTALLY different like greenscreen to window environment. I cannot think of any mainstream office/windows products that would necessitate retraining on a massive scale.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?