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."

Comments

Why should businesses care anyways?

[Weaselmancer]

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.

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[rolfwind]

I have seen Ubuntu use 6 months updates to great advantage - every release just gets better and better because you don't expect too much out of a 6 month update, while MS promises the sky and doesn't release for years on end.

I think MS needs to at least consider a model to one of incremental updates (and I'm not talking security fixes, or SP packs here.) This could turn out to be an advantage to them (especially as I see Linux distros closing the gap with tremendous speed).

Education sector not considering it either...

[Omicron32]

I've posted this comment on another story recently, but it's just as relevent to this one.

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=170 53950

why?

[blindd0t]

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.

Re:a new car!

[xmundt]

Greetings and Salutations.
          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