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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.
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.
Corporate Africa? Are they ready?
Vista needs to be out now, so that next time people roll round to a hardware refresh, Vista is available.
Why do people seem to think that this is dumb?
I wish to remain anomalous
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.
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
..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
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
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
Microsoft isn't ready for Vista, let alone corporate America.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
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.
Faster CPUs these days are comsuming LESS Power, Memory is consuming less but not as much so as CPUs, Hard Drives are smaller and use less energy (smaller = less mass = less energy to get to speed) ...
This has always been the case, but power requirements for Microsoft systems have climbed from 150 to 500 watts over the last fifteen years. Most of it has been driven by Microsoft bloat, which has delivered the same features at ever greater clock cycle cost. I'm writing this on a PII laptop. Debian Etch runs well on it but XP won't even install. At the same time, I doubt you can show me a Vista ready laptop that uses less than 50 watts as this one does.
The most important thing missing from your list is GPUs which can consume up to 350 watts on their own. If you are going to Vista, you are doing it for games and eye candy and want a super card. Vista computers are going to suck power, as the usual M$ upgrade does.
Outside the M$ world, people are doing more with less. Playstation manages to provide outstanding graphics while Xbox is setting carpets on fire.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.