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Corporate America Not Ready For Vista
thefickler writes to point out a TechBlorge article about a study indicating how few corporate computers now deployed are capable of running Windows Vista. The article says that the study, by Softchoice, will be released next week. The study found that 50% of the PCs inventoried (from a sample of 112,000 from 472 organizations) are below Vista's basic system requirements. Roughly half of those PCs will need to be replaced outright to run Vista. 94% of corporate PCs are not ready for Vista Premium Edition. The article notes that the need to upgrade hardware "could... mean that organizations will hold off upgrading to Windows Vista until their next hardware refresh," as some analysts have been saying for a while now.
Corporations aren't ready for IE7, either.
This stuff takes time. Let's do IE7 first, Microsoft. Then push Vista down our throats.
I'm a 2000 man.
Why do Microsoft always release to businesses first? I know that businesses will not use Vista until SP1 at the earliest surely one of the worlds largest companies should know this. I would imagine with their inside knowledge of Vista they will be staying away until SP2 anyway.
"article about a study indicating how few corporate computers now deployed are capable of running Windows Vista"
That's exactly the point. They want businesses to toss away the old computers and buy new ones with Vista. The know that if they try and release Vista into the public market first, it will flop as badly as ME did because it brings no significant improvements over XP, while it takes away features, and adds bad things like PVP DRM.
Oh You POS
How's that different from Win2K and WinXP? Same thing happened then. Microsoft's monopoly isn't on good software it's there ability to tie up all the major hardware vendors into all or nothing licenses to push Windows on new computer sales. It must be another slow news day.
Windows is not switching targets. Corporations are trying to get by with the low end systems like Celeron , 256 - 512 ram, and gma And that was good for the 4-5 year old xp but not for the new and bloated windows vista.
Also M$ needs some thing to stand up to OSX.
The article notes that the need to upgrade hardware "could... mean that organizations will hold off upgrading to Windows Vista until their next hardware refresh."
... duh.
Well
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
ian
"94% of corporate PCs are not ready for Vista Premium Edition"
This analysis must be right, because there is no Vista Premium Edition. Outside of Home editions, there's only Business and Ultimate.
I've been running Business and Ultimate for a while, on machines with 512M-2G of RAM, and haven't had issues on any configuration. I install it because I'm a chronic early adopter and because I work for a software company.
Anyway, like home users, businesses will upgrade as they buy more machines that have Vista pre-installed. No new news here.
1) My users are finally getting comfortable with XP.
2) My staff doesn't need the hassles of a mixed environment right now.
3) I'm not seeing what Vista will actually *do* for me over XP.
4) I don't the the budget headroom for an off-cycle hardware overhaul.
5) I'm unwilling to perform the carnal acts necessary to get that extra funding.
6) I'm not deploying another MS OS before the first service pack.
Last place I worked, All the PCs had at least 512MB, and those were 4 years old. That vast majority had 1GB and the ones that just came in this year had 2GB. 4 year replacement cycle and every PC in that building should be capable of running Vista.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Upgrading to Vista from our current XP standard is a non-starter. There is no way that I'm interested in upsetting my worker's day-to-day productivity by having a desktop admin perform an upgrade. If my employees cost me $500/day each (with salary, benefits, and per-employee expenses such as office space), and they lose a day's worth of productivity, then upgrading to Vista is an extreme waste of money (since I don't see any benefit).
I'm sure I'll start to move to Vista once I start procuring new hardware. But I have good equipment now. The benefit of brand new Desktop PC's for my people isn't clear at all to me. I'll replace my old equipment once it makes sense to do so, but I'm not going to drop $2000 on a new desktop until I can see a clear benefit in doing so. I'd rather allocate that money to something that can make a real difference to operations (like bonuses).
Maybe I'll see a Vista productivity benefit in six months - or maybe in two years. But right now, I say "no way" to an upgrade - it looks like a money sink to me.
Cost/benefit of upgrading could be better warranty, better vendor support, both of which may mean lower support costs. Support costs are big factors in what gets chosen. How about less power use by the newest generation of CPUs and hard drives, when a company has 1000's of Desktops that power bill is a factor. Also products reach End-Of-Life where they are no longer supported by the vendor. Those would be my Top 3 reasons to upgrade.
I too don't see a lot of Apps (except Windows bloatware) forcing upgrades. Which I hope is good news for Linux on the Corporate Desktop. With GNOME and other GUIs, OpenOffice and various other open source "office" applications you can have the same functions as a Windows PC but need a lot less CPU and Memory. And the cost to "license" Linux and the apps is a heck of a lot lower than MS products not to mention the GPL (and CDL) and not nearly as bad as the MS shrinkware licenses.
I agree but many companies use the "newest and greatest" to attract talent. Potential employees want it wether it is needed or not. The fact that a P3/1Ghz is more then enough to run XP/2000, MS Office and a few company specific specialized apps is not relavent (my company had Compaq EN815's which were that spec a few years ago and they worked fine). A person fresh out of a top tier law school looking for a prestigous place to work is going to use technology capabilities and gadgets as one of the deciding factors. There is a huge amount of surveys and reports about potential employers and what they offer and how the existing employees use and adapt to technology. Everyone in the industry reads it.
See how excited a magna cum laude or summa cum laude gets when you tell him/her that you have 5 year old laptops and are running Windows 2000.
To be honest, I'm only an IT person with no honors and I would second guess going that was still using Windows 2000 for the primary desktop platform.
Aside from the attract talent motive to upgrade, there is always just as many companies that upgrade just to do it and ROI is not even considered. You will never be fired for choosing MS or considering using the "newest" version.
As the market reaches saturation point, as it likely has given how long Windows eXPploitable has been out, the income from such software starts to drop off. Therefore the income stream has to be boosted again by releasing a "new" product.
By making it seem that the new OS ias more secure than the last, not really a hard task given M$'s track record thus fare, they hope to lure in the flashing lights and shiny dudads brigade, namely upper management dolts who have as much technical clue and the average ant and who are attracted to fake exteriors, as evidenced by the trophy wives on many arms. These PHB's fall for the vendors marketing slimeballs blather and the sales droids blandishments and force the IT department to roll out the whole unholy mess on the poor suffering masses that actually do the work.
$2000 desktops? Good lord.
Few organizations are going to go and re-image every computer with Vista. What's going to happen is that every company of significant size that regularly purchaes machines from a large vendor is going to start getting Vista LICENSES shipped to them with their regular purchases of hardware. Your large-organization IT staff is going to keep deploying the standard image while stockpiling Vista licenses and working on the "when the suits are ready" Vista image.
And, those $500 Dells that big organizations give to their employees - they're all quite up to snuff for running Vista. Optiplex 6xx series desktops have been good to go with Vista for while a while.
Oh, sure, some organizations might never move to Vista, but they're going to be buying Vista licences (and Office 2007 licenses) when they buy their machines. That's the nature of the beast for people far enough up the ladder to be VLA/Select. It doesn't mean we'll deploy them - but we're sure going to be buying those licenses.
Our standard will remain XP for the next, oh, two years. Then we'll start delivering new machines with Vista, and making an effort to retire any Windows 2000 machines still in service. Of course, we're still about 2% Windows 9x, but it takes time to change out 25,000 desktops running hundreds of different pieces of software at dozens of different facilities.
Personally, I think the Vista requirements are insane for business machines. They are pretty stupid even for gaming machines. I have no idea how they are going to build Vista-ready laptops that actually get some hours of battery life. There is no need for these specs, except that MS needs to give users a ''new experience'' by any means necessary, since theri business model is fundamentally flawed.
What MS forgets, or has to ignore, is that a PC is a tool. A tool schould behave the same over a long time. You don't want a new ''experience'' every few years. You want to mater the tool once and then keep using it for a very long time. Hence you want it to work the same over a very long time.
This will prompt more people to look for alternatives to MSes greed and insanity.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"In this slide, we can see the huge penis you'll get if you buy this product."
It's been a long time.
Proposed justification of Visat/Hardware purchase:
How about less power use by the newest generation of CPUs and hard drives, when a company has 1000's of Desktops that power bill is a factor.
"Vista Ready" machines are going to suck more power, not less. The demand much greater clock rates, video support and RAM. Compare this to the average coporate network full of PIIIs more or less. "Vista Premium" of course is much worse.
I'll believe the better power management hype when I see it in operation. If M$ cared about your electric bill, ACPI and WOL would already work. When I can buy a desktop from Dell that works that way, I'll say it's about time.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
..and the workplace is really Windows' main market. I'm willing to guess that at least half their profits come from corporations. The question is, why do they seem to be switching targets?
Their market isn't the workplace, it's PCs everywhere. That market is saturated with Windows, and their product will continue to go onto newly built PCs until and unless something that makes a suitable replacement comes along.
That means they don't need to build new stuff for the user. They will get their money anyways. They're going to keep getting paid for Windows licenses as long as Windows remains the dominant platform with no more functionality than they have now.
What they ARE doing is selling their users out to media companies. They are getting paid by those companies to put support for powerful DRM on every computer around the planet so there will exist a market for DRM media. They are getting paid for this as added revenue on top of the "Windows and Office" tax.
They believe that they can get paid by third parties to design Windows so it will intentionally fuck over the people who use it and we will still buy it same as always.
Chances are, they are right.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You must have worked for a very strange company. From what I can see, the developers normally get big muscular machines (by then current standards) so they can do their work faster. Then, they design programs and systems that only work acceptably on their machines, not on those the target audience is expected to have.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The only thing that I've really noticed between Office 2000, XP and 2003 is the UI keeps changing. The program seems to work exactly the same, after checking a few boxes in 2k that are default in 2k3.
OTOH, this UI changing has been slowly driving me mad. Seems like the only thing MS does on releasing a new version of Outlook (or any of the other Office apps) is make the edges softer on the UI and move all the menu items around! I can see restructuring the menu if your functionality demands it, but it seems that's all MS does!
"He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. [...] It's what drives men mad, being methodical." G.K.Chesterton
HUH? warranty? there is none. other than hardware. NOBODY gives OS support warranties.
Better vendor support?? what? If your vendors cant support 2000 then you need to find better vendors right away. there is NO REASON outside of some very very tiny reasons. Adobe tried to claim you had to run XP for their Premier product. a simple hack to fake out their OS detection is all that is needed to Run Premier Pro under windows 2000. Every single business APP out there runs perfectly under windows 2000.
Windows 2000 + Office 2000 is incredibly fast on today's el-cheapo hardware. Outlook opens in a 1/2 second compared to the 35 seconds on my Core Duo workstation that has U320 SCSI drives.
MAny of us refuse to take the performance hit that new Microsoft products come with. Even the latest Autocad still runs fine under windows 2000.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This shows how deeply embedded M$ spin is in the memes of the masses. For years evryone asked "Is Linux Ready for the Desktop", not "Are Desktop users ready for Linux." Now, M$ releases Vista, and the question is reversed?
Is Vista ready for Corporate America? No, it never will be! I am a Vista Beta Tester, and I can tell you that Vista sucks wind. It is garbage. It offers nothing that Linux hasn't had for years, lacks some important features Linux has had for years, forces DRM on an unwitting public, and requires a hardware upgrade in most cases in order to be marginally useful. The new approach to security is to exude the appearance of security , rather than simply ignore it per the old policy.
I have one question for M$ execs. Linux is secure without having to ask the user "are you sure you want to do that" ever. Why does your "wonderful new OS" have to ask the user 752 times a day? It is no longer good enough to do the spin in the press. Now the OS is doing the spin as well. If the user can use an "OK" hotkey to authorize an action, what stops a virus from emulating the hotkey-press? Answer: It does exactly one thing. The same thing M$ always has done. It gives the uninformed user a false sense of security.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
circa the 200MHz era. Except for gaming, these CPUs were quite fast enough for word processing, accounting, internet access, email, etceteras.
Faster CPUs have given us more glitz. I'm not convinced they've given us more functionality: Word 2007 doesn't do a whole helluva lot more than Word 6, MSIE 7 doesn't do a whole lot more than MSIE 3, not in terms of true-blue functionality.
So I can easily imagine most businesses are in no rush to upgrade their machines en masse. Why should they? They're just gonna end up spending thousands of dollars in new hardware, software, re-training for the new software, and endless technical support as the bugs are ironed out of the new network and installations.
Vista is rightfully regarded by most businesses as an obvious case of a high-risk foot-meets-bullet fuckup just waiting to pounce on the dummy who decides to champion the idea of upgrading.
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I think that Microsoft should be the first ones to adop this as a corporate standard across the board.
Not only will they gather valuable experience dubugging the problems first hand, with the actual user in front them, but they are costing everyonen else money every bug that stops some piece of business fulidity from happening costs the company that loses the advantage money. They have the joy of live data. What fun!
Microsoft is hoping to pawn off the cost of being the early corporate adopter because it would hurt their business to do so.
Now, who's business, then, wouldn't be inancially disadvantaged compared to a competitor who just... waited?
I personally couldn't recommend a comporation going to vista any time soon.