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

a new car!

[yagu]

Wait, software doesn't wear out, at least not like cars do. This is where Microsoft has to re-figure the business model. Their products (OS, Office suite, etc.) are so mature people and companies actually have to rationalize moving to the new plan. In the old days migration paths often followed needs -- today most needs are fulfilled. How many thousands of fonts could one possibly want in their documents?

It's time to think about service. It's time to think about customers. It's time to think about humility. Microsoft, other than their monopoly, no longer has a hammer to coerce the public into the new products -- though that's probably enough.

Meanwhile, with all of this talk of a long adoption window, wouldn't this be one of the most opportune times for things Linux to gain purchase (how ironic for a free product)? As companies look at budgets and costs, couldn't Linux now get it's foot in the door? I hope so...

(Note: from the mysterious slashdot future, how ironic -- an article about Microsoft dissing Open Source as insecure because people can look at the code! Looks like Microsoft is hard at work ensuring a glance at Linux and other Open Source software is at least uncomfortable.)

Re:a new car!

[hey]

Well thingd wear out in that they stop support for older OSes.

Re:a new car!

[LWATCDR]

Microsoft is going to "force" the software to wear out.
New file formats are a good way to start.
Not selling the old software.
OEM bundles where the OS and applications are only to be used on that one machine. Get a new computer and pay for a new OS.
I hope that OO.org instead focuses on making the software easier, smaller, faster, and more reliable.

Re:a new car!

[traabil]

Meanwhile, with all of this talk of a long adoption window, wouldn't this be one of the most opportune times for things Linux to gain purchase (how ironic for a free product)? As companies look at budgets and costs, couldn't Linux now get it's foot in the door? I hope so...

If there's no compelling event to swap a perfectly working (sic) XP for Vista, why would one consider moving to Linux? Surely, the migration cost in terms of training need would be even higher for such a move.

Re:a new car!

[diersing]

True. I also wonder if training is really that big a hurdle anymore. As the general public (and especially long term business users) get more tech savvy can't we expect the average user to just need a couple hours of play time to re-learn where the core functionality is? Everything the average user needs is in the ribbons of Office07, its just a matter of learning their arrangement.

Even greater reason to push home users towards Google's Docs & Spreadsheets, but the business users everyone is concerned about aren't mindless cattle anymore. Lets give them credit. Office 2003 & 2007 can be installed in parallel, let them play with it and call it pilot testing.

Re:a new car!

[Joe The Dragon]

It is more then just the training of a new arrangement. It's the Compatibility with older docs with formulas , Add-ins and more need to be updated for 2007 and so on.

Re:a new car!

[Overly Critical Guy]

Wait, software doesn't wear out, at least not like cars do.

Microsoft software is quite a bit different in that regard. It goes bald, its ass sags, and it yells at customers who walk on its lawn.

Re:a new car!

[misleb]

I agree. New file formats are still a pretty strong drive to upgrade. All it takes is a few people in an organization to upgrade by choice... or some customers or perhaps vendors... and suddenly everyone else has to (not necessarily, but people often find it easier to just upgrade to the latest than mess around trying to make th older version read the new docs). This works for Office. I'm not sure what will drive Vista uptake. That is, as long as Office 2007 works on XP...

-matthew

Re:a new car!

[Danga]

Clearly you yet to meet my boss.

This is your boss and you are fired. :-)

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

Re:a new car!

[geekwithsoul]

People (as a collective term), never stop being 'mindless cattle.' It's built into our little monkey brains to 'enjoy' being part of a group. That's not to say that there aren't those who also enjoy blazing trails, as that is also undoubtedly true -- the ability hold conflicting ideas, probably more than anything else, is what really makes us human. That said, humans seem to enjoy the inertia of a paradigm and shifts in that paradigm makes us uncomfortable.

That same maturity of both technology and its users you mentioned is actually the reason people will not want to switch to Vista or Office 2007. Other major format and interface changes for mainstream users (the Win XP crowd now, other MS OSes in the past) all occurred when the technology was rapidly growing. Actual new technologies are now relatively stagnate and we're busy pushing the envelope of what those technologies can do, but the same basic technology (by example TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML) is pretty mundane now. People are now fairly satisfied with their computing experiences and they will resist change far more than they used to.

As an example, imagine an automotive technology that changed the fundamental way we use cars -- in the U.S. for example, imagine the uproar if automakers suddenly put the driver of the car on the right side or in the middle. They could back it up with studies showing how this was demonstrably a good thing, but no one would like them or buy the cars, because they were comfortable with the existing technology -- warts and all.

Re:a new car!

[COMON$]

For our office we are still mainly a Win 2000 server domain. Just now moving to 2003 through attrition. Ya there are perks to moving to the next server/office level but are they worth the cost? Will our office use them? Heck most of our users cant distinguish between word and wordpad. Most users just want to be able to type a report on letterhead, use italics and bold here and there and that is it.

Unless security is an issue, I really see no need to over complicate something with more features when what we have does just fine. You have to show me a product that is major like jumping from NTSP6 to win2K/XP. Where my current OS can handle all the devices I have just fine, my current office product (2003) works above and beyond our needs, I dont need to upgrade until I see an end of life on the product.

With few exceptions I think most seasoned Windows administrators would agree.

Re:a new car!

[steelfood]

I disagree. While back then, with no viable competitor, new file formats would justify an upgrade. If clients were sending you office 2003 file but you're running office 97, you're definitely going to want to move to office 2003. However, in this day and age, office is no longer the monopoly it once was. There are three factors hindering the office 2003 to office 2007 transition, and they've largely been covered by other posters here.

To reiterate, first is the completely redesigned interface, and the need for retraining. This will make companies, large and small, reluctant to upgrade. They'll hold off as long as possible. Remember, people in managerial positions and their assistants use office. And for most of these people, who have trouble with technology as it is and who'd spent the better part of the past 10-15 years getting used to office since the days of 5.0, retraining is going to be a very painful process. Add to the fact that they're the decision makers, and you've got even less chance of companies moving to office 2007.

The second is the presence of a half-decent competitor: open office. So what if microsoft stops selling office 2003? Suddenly, open office, with its familiar interface and remarkably similar feature set is going to look very lucrative. And add to the fact that it's free, and there's even greater incentive to move to it if microsoft is foolish enough to stop selling office 2003 outright. Sure, it's not as polished as office 2003. But as long as it can read and write those files, it'll do. New file formats force upgrades only when there's nothing decent available to read and process the old one. Open office isn't stunning, but it'll do for the most part.

The final, and most important factor is the same one that plagued Intel and AMD a few years back. Office 2003 is good enough. Sure, it might be lacking in a few areas compared to office 2007. But people have found ways around those shortcomings already, and having spent many years improving those workarounds, they're pretty efficient by now. Why upgrade to 2007 when the feature set of 2003 is sufficient?

And these are the same reasons people won't upgrade to vista. Sure, vista might be more secure. And at home, it'll find wide adoption because of its OEM bundling. But in the corporate world, people know that an upgrade will cost money. How much depends on the company, but if it's on par or more than the existing security budget for the current windows xp setup, there's no reason to upgrade. And by the time xp goes into extended support, well, there's still a couple of years, and like office, there's an alternative that's gaining popularity. So by the time businesses get around to deploying office 2007 and vista, they might just go, screw it, and start deploying linux instead.

More likely, anything that isn't backwards compatible will hinder the transition rather than help it. The reason why people moved to XP? Because it worked well with 2k. And it had a set of features 2k didn't have that was actually useful. Vista actually was supposed to have some of those nifty features that would encourage people to upgrade. But over the course of its development, they all were eventually canned--put off indefinitely or until a later upgrade pack.

Re:a new car!

[COMON$]

I apologize, I wasn't very clear. It relates in that for our network it isnt the training that is a problem. When we moved from Corel to MS Office the functionality was similar. We offered no training, but we would take calls on quirks. The transition process took over a year. But when it came down to it, only a handful of people out of over a 1000 really noticed a difference other than MS looked prettier. Databases were converted by IT and there are a lot of conversion tools for everything else.

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.

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?

[stokessd]

The business arguement is that sooner or later every new machine that comes through the door will have vista on it. So we will have it, it's just a matter of when and how best to deal with it.

Sheldon

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[diersing]

In small shops maybe, but most mid-size companies and up deploy a managed desktop image (in most cases the manufacturer pre-loads it when the machine is ordered).

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[chill]

Why would I want that? The only place I can think this might be good is on shared computers, but other than public machines I haven't seen a lot of those and they aren't on a domain. Well, if they are, it is with a generic user and they don't switch.

The ONE time I've seen this be useful was terminals on a manufacturing floor. Not for shift workers, as they log in and out on their shift, but for when a supervisor comes over to do something. This is because Windows doesn't have decent support for something like SU, and it shows.

Actually, that is exactly what "fast user switching on Domains" is, a version of SU. WTF took them so long?

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[morgan_greywolf]

I mean, honestly - what does Vista do that XP doesn't? From a business standpoint, of course.

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.

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[Frosty Piss]

Where I work, what the machine comes with is irrelevent, we reimage them all with our "standard image". I don't expect to have to deal with Vista until at least SP2.

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).

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[RESPAWN]

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.

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[vertinox]

I mean, honestly - what does Vista do that XP doesn't? From a business standpoint, of course.

For one, you won't be able to play Halo 3 LAN games at the office without it!

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[TheGavster]

I think you're confusing MS with Apple. MS service packs are free, it's the Mac ones you need to rebuy the OS for. Even for free, though, dealing with all the new anomalies a service pack generates every 6 months rather than every 2-3 years would be kind of a pain.

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[sasdrtx]

anything that allows us, the admins, to remotely exercise greater system control via AD policies is a very good thing. I hope by "very good" you mean "incredibly evil".

Among the other evils inflicted upon the universe by Microsoft are the "features" that allow power-crazed MCSE geekoids to get their jollies screwing around with and locking down my desktop settings.

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[jafac]

...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.

Re:Why should businesses care anyways?

[Weaselmancer]

So asking a question is spreading ignorance? Nice troll, fanboy.

If it works, don't fix it.

[erbbysam]

If it works, don't fix it.

Re:If it works, don't fix it.

[Phillup]

If it works, don't fix it.
 
Yeah but that would dry up one of MS's many revenue streams! How's that?

Which MS product doesn't need fixing?

Their entire business model is based on making people think that finally this stuff will work!

Hell

[El Lobo]

The system hasn't been out a mounth. There is an initial inertia to any change. Give it some time. Or yoyu thing any company using Linux have already updated to 2.6.19 ? Or should we say that companies 'BLAH' about it as well.

I work at a large university in sweden.In february we will upgrade about 3000 machines to Vista. It's a question aout budget and timing, between many reasons.

Who will exercise downgrade rights?

[davidwr]

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.

Disappointment?

[Abcd1234]

Those who expected the initial Vista release to generate a wave of hype will be sorely disappointed.

So, what, all two of them?

Yeah right...

[zappepcs]

Even if I liked MS products, and I'm not saying they suck, I still wouldn't entertain the thought of an upgrade project at this time of year. With support being taxed as it is due to holidays, and training not able to fully support an enterprise wide roll-out, it is just stupid to think companies will gleefully jump on the Vista bandwagon and roll out the shiny new MS products.

People debate the cost of rolling out OSS products for these very reasons, and MS lackeys have touted how a MS upgrade costs less in support and training for the upgrade. The simple truth: The upgrade roll-out costs are near the same when there are feature and function changes. Companies also have to think of the COST of new licenses on top of generic roll-out problems and costs. Its just not a good time of year for such activity. I think it was a poor choice of times to launch?

Slashdot 'Blah'...

[LeedsSideStreets]

About Articles About People Being 'Blah' About Vista



...not that I blame anybody for posting the articles. It is kind of an unprecedented wave of underwhelmingness.

Incompatibity to force upgrades strikes again

[Whammy666]

Yet again M$ is releasing another upgrade with incompatible file formats to earlier versions of office tools with the expectations that millions of users will be forced to pay yet another M$ tax to exchange documents with fellow business associates. I'm so glad we've converted over to OpenOffice.

I can see no good reason to migrate to Vista, and the compatibility and re-training issues are strong reasons not to. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Re:Incompatibity to force upgrades strikes again

[doktor-hladnjak]

Yet again M$ is releasing another upgrade with incompatible file formats to earlier versions of office tools with the expectations that millions of users will be forced to pay yet another M$ tax to exchange documents with fellow business associates.

Except that this isn't the case. Microsoft is providing a free add-in for older versions that will allow them to read and write the new XML formats. Office 2003 (maybe others?) is smart enough to recognize the new formats and phone home to Microsoft to download the relevant add-in.

Re:helloooooooo

[PFI_Optix]

$1,000 is way over the top. Businesses aren't licensing Vista Ultimate. Oh, and we're talking about upgrades, not new purchases since those won't be much different than adding new licenses today. It will cost somewhere around $300-400 to upgrade.

You should see educational pricing. It's going to cost us about $100 per PC. For BOTH.

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

Re:Only gamers will care about Vista

[Whammy666]

Vista may not be an asset to gamers. DX10 doesn't really add any new features to the graphics capability of a system since that is largely dependent on hardware. Developers may like the newer DX10 interface, but there are severe backward compatibility issues for users. Any game which depends on DX10 will not run on XP or W2K platforms. I can't see developers embracing DX10/Vista for fear of excluding a large portion of the gaming market.

Companies haven't upgraded from Windows 2000 yet

[rickkas7]

According to AssetMetrix, as of June 2005 half of all corporate PCs were still running Windows 2000. Considering XP was released in October 2001, I don't find it at all surprising that businesses haven't jumped on installing Vista yet.

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.

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:I wonder if some compines will move away from M

[NineNine]

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.

Windows XP is at end of support life time..

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!!

There is not a compelling case to upgrade

[bogie]

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.

Re:There is not a compelling case to upgrade

[WuphonsReach]

Bitlocker might be a great solution to keep stolen laptops from causing so much damage.

Only if you buy the "right" version of Vista (i.e. "Ultimate"). Which comes with other things that business really aren't interested in.

Re:There is not a compelling case to upgrade

[bmajik]

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

Yawn

[Mr_Silver]

Don't gforget that:

• Companies were "blah" about Windows XP
• Companies were "blah" about Office 2003
• Companies were "blah" about Windows 2000
• Companies were "blah" about Office 2002
• Companies were "blah" about Office 2000

Companies are blah about replacements to pretty much anything that already works and already does the job well enough. Eventually they'll shift, but only when all their hardware has broken down and been replaced by stuff that can run it, the current operating system of choice is no longer supported and they have major applications that won't run in that aforementioned operating system.

This is hardly new, they have been working this way for years and I fully expect them to be "blah" about the next version of Office and Windows as well.

Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that is blindingly obvious.

Re:Yawn

[Joe The Dragon]

Yes companies did wait to go form 2000 to xp and some may have need to add ram to a few systems to make it work.
But this time that may need to add a lot ram, faster cpu, better video card, and a Bigger HD.
so that will slow it down even more.

Hey, my company is switching!!

[kace]

... My company recently announced that we're making the switch -- from win2000 to WindowsXP !! Woohoo. I'll probably have retired before we see Vista.

I think M$ is in trouble. Their business model seems to require churning perfectly good SW. Businesses have caught on. If it aint' broke .... (Or, if it ain't more broke than the upgrade.)

Enterprises. Don't. Care.

[hobo sapiens]

That's right, large corporations do not care. Name a large corporation that wants to be on the bleeding edge. If it ain't broke, then don't fix it. And if there's one thing worse than fixing the unbroke, it's "upgrading" from fixed to broken, as Vista will surely be in at least some fashion.

XP is fairly stable and so what incentive do corporations have for upgrading? Better security? That's laughable, as this is a 1st gen of a new OS from Microsoft we're talking about. More eye candy? Yeah, now *that's* a top priority. If there are no real compelling reasons for the average home user to upgrade, then there are especially no reasons for a company to do so.

My company is sure blah

[allscan]

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."

Businesses and Upgrades

[KoldKompress]

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.

Gentoo Linux (Ignore compilation for a moment)

[dpilot]

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.)

Re:Gentoo Linux (Ignore compilation for a moment)

[eldepeche]

Debian testing is pretty much the same, except I don't have to keep a bunch of source libraries on my box.

Less is More!

[Dareth]

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.

The "Business Argument"

[Z34107]

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:

• Less drivers need to be signed
• New user mode drivers will most likely be easier to program than their kernel-mode counterparts
• A user mode driver crash will not be able to cause a blue screen.

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.

At what point will new file formats backfire?

[WoTG]

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?

File formats

[Shawn is an Asshole]

You do know that Microsoft has a Compatability Pack for Office 2000-2003, right? It adds support for the new formats.