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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.
"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
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.
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 $2000 on a new desktop until I can see a clear benefit in doing so. I'd rather allocate that money to something that can make a real difference to operations (like bonuses).
Maybe I'll see a Vista productivity benefit in six months - or maybe in two years. But right now, I say "no way" to an upgrade - it looks like a money sink to me.
Cost/benefit of upgrading could be better warranty, better vendor support, both of which may mean lower support costs. Support costs are big factors in what gets chosen. How about less power use by the newest generation of CPUs and hard drives, when a company has 1000's of Desktops that power bill is a factor. Also products reach End-Of-Life where they are no longer supported by the vendor. Those would be my Top 3 reasons to upgrade.
I too don't see a lot of Apps (except Windows bloatware) forcing upgrades. Which I hope is good news for Linux on the Corporate Desktop. With GNOME and other GUIs, OpenOffice and various other open source "office" applications you can have the same functions as a Windows PC but need a lot less CPU and Memory. And the cost to "license" Linux and the apps is a heck of a lot lower than MS products not to mention the GPL (and CDL) and not nearly as bad as the MS shrinkware licenses.
As the market reaches saturation point, as it likely has given how long Windows eXPploitable has been out, the income from such software starts to drop off. Therefore the income stream has to be boosted again by releasing a "new" product.
By making it seem that the new OS ias more secure than the last, not really a hard task given M$'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.
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.
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
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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