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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.
...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?
"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.
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.
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.
Corporate Africa? Are they ready?
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.
The OS itself is priced way out of line but then when you factor in all new hardware, it's insane.
I've talked to several customers of mine and many of them just bought new machines in the last 18 months.
They have no intentions of replacing them all over again just to run this new OS that's not all that revolutionary.
I'll bet that's the general consensus. In general of course.
Our company isn't in any hurry to upgrade, nor are a lot of companies I talk to. Most like ours, have spent a lot of capital in the last 24 months upgrading from NT4 to XP, from Office 2000 to Office 2003. We have XP tweaked out, locked down, patched up and running perfectly, sort of the way we had NT4/Office2000 tweaked. If we were to upgrade to Vista, to get the same performance, we would have to dump an extra 512 meg of ram into every box, since we have them running 512meg now. XP for our purposes runs pretty well with 512 meg of ram, but on a couple of test boxes, 512 meg with Vista is like running XP on 256. Yeah it runs, but you do a lot of swapping. For now, we are holding off on Vista/Office07, until at the earliest Q2 of 07. Any NEW computers bought/built, will be built with an OS update in mind, but will come configured with XP, NOT Vista.
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.
The big reason for pushing out the business editions first was because MS sold a lot of Software Assurance licenses with the understanding that Vista upgrades would be included. The first licenses are going to begin expiring this month, so MS would have been in the position of having to extend those licenses to meet their promises. The enterprise sector would have looked on software assurance for the OS as being just a bill of goods that MS was trying to sell them if Vista hadn't shipped within the license date.
94% of corporate PCs are not ready for Vista Premium Edition
1. There is no such thing as a "Vista Premium Edition".
2. If they mean the closest -- "Vista Home Premium Edition", that's not supposed to be a common Vista edition for corporations.
3. Are these talking about meeting recommendations or requirements? I see few corporations being willing to run Aero Glass, and without that, you can easily get by with 512 MB or 1 GB RAM and no special graphics card to speak of (assuming it meets XP requirements).
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Let's start with some facts:
t ml= /library/en-us/wmpsdk11/mmp_sdk/glossary.asp Search the term "component enforces those rights." on the page.
Vista's *six* SKU's are sold in various states of disabledness. For example, if you want to use a DVD burner, you must upgrade. Hmmm,.no matter the version of XP you could use a DVD burner... That's just one of many restrictions.
Let's move to your clearly uninformed question: "Is there some magic mechanism which disables your ability to play unencrypted content?"
Why, yes there is! The latest WMP phones home to MS when you play a song and catalogs your content. When the inevitable OS reinstall happens and you attempt to play the same songs you get some bad news. It seems it's okay to play the music on that "other" OS install, but not this one. You agree to this when you click-through licenses. Here's a link to a guy that experienced it. http://www.bandddesigns.com/blogger/arch/002942.h
Here's Microsoft's SDK http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
Now, Microsoft and their media friends are taking away your right to first sale as secretly as possible. Vista will help them meet that end very nicely. Set top boxes and a variety of media subscription models will help greatly as well. Add in dragging some children into court and consider it done.
I assure you, this is only the beginning. Please consider using another OS that ensures your current freedoms. Many Linux distros are good,
I'm sure the above-average PHB senses this anyway. Which is part of the reason the Vista uptake will be so slow.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
There are some things Vista could have that would really draw me in. Sadly, I can't seem to find out if any of these are part of the product or not. In posting this, I'm hoping someone can either answer or point me to an answer for some of the questions.
Number one on my Windows Vista wish list is that they virtualize the screen more.
What I want is actually very simple. I want to tell Windows - in one place - that my screen resolution is not 72dpi, but is in fact 125dpi. Once that is accomplished, all Windows elements should be scaled to that result.
For any application which does not specify drawing size, but rather specifies pixels - the new AERO graphics engine should do a simple calculation "X pixels * (125 / 72) = Y pixels" and draw it as Y. For fonts and other "vector" based drawing objects, this should be even easier as the curve calculations are already based on this kind of math.
If this is done properly, an 8pt font will take up the same physical area on a high resolution monitor as it does on a low resolution monitor. What's more, it will fit properly in buttons because the number of pixels on the button have been properly sized and should match.
Some people may WANT that optimized screen real estate. That's easily handled. They just need to set the DPI setting on back to 72, and their ultra-sharp tiny little fonts will be right back again. The only thing that could suffer - in theory - is looking at pictures. If something is supposed to be 10 pixels, it ends up being 17.36 for me. Rounding is where you get the "fuzzy" aspect.
Why does this matter? Right now, I'm looking at a 19" monitor which is optimized for 1280 by 1024 pixel resolution. The laptop is more extreme. It's a 17" monitor that is 1920 by 1080. Making some simple assumptions that the pixels are square and aligned uniformly (which they are not, actually) the two monitors come out to about 86 and 125 pixels per inch respectively.
LCD screens are not like the bulky old "tube" based screens. The pixels aren't projected onto a phosphor screen; they are actual hardware - like little light bulbs. If you decrease the display resolution, you're getting less crisp representation at each point than you would at the optimize resolution because the dots themselves cannot change size. They must therefore be approximated.
Where this becomes a problem is that many aspects of the Windows screen are designed to be a set number of pixels in height or width. The unit of measure is in pixels, not inches. This includes fonts, title bars, buttons, icons, and all kinds of other things. Much of the time, Windows doesn't know how many of those pixels fit on a linear inch of screen space on my screen. What people don't realize is that the old standard has been to assume about 72dpi for screen resolution. That means on my laptop, with nearly twice that resolution, things tend to be on half the ideal size.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Microsoft isn't ready for Vista, let alone corporate America.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
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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So, remind me which corporations of notable size are known to be early adopters?
Well, I recently finished a project at a rather large corporation (which I'll mercifully not name here) that hasn't quite finished upgrading all its W95 machines to W98. They also have a few NT machines, mostly in the IT dept.
No, I'm not joking. And this isn't the first case like this that I've seen.
Funny thing was that the project I worked on involved migrating software from a big IBM mainframe to a flock of distributed unix servers. Talk about having one foot in each world.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.