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Vista — CIOs' First Impressions
lizzyben writes "Baseline magazine recently interviewed CIOs and IT consultants to get their take on Microsoft's Vista and is reporting that 'Most big companies will wait at least a year before deploying Vista to make sure the operating system is stable and that third-party applications work well with it, the beta testers say.'"
"Laziness is an optimisation protocol"
you'll be waiting a lot more than a year
my firm's Win2k is at SP4 and still isn't
I said for a long time, "No, no, Y2K was fine it was Win2K we had all the trouble with."
This
What do you mean Win2k isn't secure? It's perfectly secure so long as you don't connect it to any sort of network.
I'd rather install Vista on the PC's of our competitors, their wives', their childrens' and the pets' of their children.
For FREE!
Because I'm such a nice person.
As long as those are internal machines on a closed network, then yes, stay with what works.
I am NaN
This must be the most informative /. post. Ever.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I do believe that the correct CEO response on the phone is going to be:
"this is going to cost us how much per user? it's more secure? seriously? what about xyz? it works with that? o really? have you tested it yourself? your an employee at Microsoft and you haven't had a chance to use it yourself? call me back in a year"
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
For larger companies, Vista and Office 2007 will probably be rolled out pretty early, at least to some divisions/groups. Microsoft typically makes upgrade licenses available very cheap (or free) for these organizations, and also uses other incentives/ploys to convince these organizations to upgrade. It's in Microsoft's best interest to get these companies to convert first to start the "trickle down" ball rolling, particularly when it comes to Office 2007.
As far as other companies are concerned, everyone is right - it could be 5 or 10 years before they upgrade. I'm the CIO of a small/medium business, and we are still running Windows 98 on some of our non-networked machines. Smaller companies won't invest a penny in upgrades until they're forced to do so, which won't be until Microsoft stops creating XP security updates, or until enough applications are released that only run on Vista.
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
I've finally got a desktop setup that is resonably secure, works with all my applications and as long as I'm sensible about installing dogey software free from Viruses and adware all based on XP. There is nothing that attracts me to Vista though I'm sure I will get a free copy next time I buy a PC and I look forward to using that a coaster
Cheap UK and US VPS
was it intentional that you didn't finish your sentence while talking about the reliability of win2k?
Jonathanjk.com
We have all pentium 4 3ghz with 1 gig of ram 160 gig harddrives an x600 gpus . here at the library all capable of running vista but we will not be upgrading. we have no need to. Any new computers we will get with vista though.
I work in the IT department of a University. We probably won't start rolling out Vista until we have to, since we have things fairly stable right now and the re-training for some people complicates the issue. We have plans to get some Vista machines in the IT department purely for the reason of support for students and preparation for migration a year or more in the future.
"Oooh, Shiny!"
I own a ten person company, and it's exactly how you described it, with us. I'll leave whatever is working for as long as it works, but when it's time to buy a new machine, it's whatever Dell (or whoever) has for cheapest, and I'll take whatever Windows OS it comes with. Right now, if I need a new machine in the next 6 months or so, I *might* try a bit harder to get one with XP, but it's not a big deal. As long as it's Windows, I don't really care what it is. We *never* upgrade OS's, because the oldest we have in here right now is W2K, and that works just fine.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but some of us really aren't switching because we don't want to. We write portable C++ here. You know the Visual Studio application the majority of our developers prefer to use? VC++ 6. You know, the ancient, pre-standard, poor-code-generating one. Why? Because we write portable C++. All the .net stuff in the world has zero value to us.
From our perspective, later VC++ versions have overall been one screw-up after another. The performance is abysmal; we don't care whether it's because they're written in .net, or because the architecture was changed to support all the other .net languages, we just see a UI that's slow to unresponsive way more than it ever used to be and a debugger that keeps screwing up when it used to be almost 100% reliable. We want help to show us the standard library calls and language rules, not a zillion .net-related buzzwords. We want the old source browsing features that just worked, not a new set of substandard not-quite-replacements that took three major releases to get and still can't do as much as we had in 1998.
It's not that there aren't good features in the more recent VS releases. Some of us even prefer to use those releases. But most of us don't, and it's got nothing to do with roll-out times and everything to do with the fact that they simply aren't as effective as tools that help us do our jobs. Please don't kid yourself that it's anything else.
We can and do take exactly the same view with operating systems. We will upgrade to Vista when there is some advantage in doing so. Right now, we run a heterogeneous network with many different versions of Windows, UNIX flavours, Linux, MacOS, etc. and it works. Based on our experiences upgrading OSes previously, changing desktops to a new version of Windows is risking a show-stopper for the entire development group until a patch to let our systems interoperate properly is released, which may take a considerable time and we can't control. No sane manager is going to authorise that, and again, it's not because we can't do it faster, it's because from bitter experience we just don't trust MS software to get it right until there's a lot of outside experience to say they have.
And it's the same deal with office suites, too. We could upgrade to Office 2007 pretty much as soon as it's released. We have sensible software management procedures in place, and global licensing arrangements with MS. But until we know we can open documents from older versions in 2007 and vice versa, which again was not the case with some previous upgrades causing us much pain, we aren't going to trust the upgrade. Even then, we're going to take some convincing that it's worth risking a hit for introducing the new UI, that there are new features to justify the upgrade (no point disrupting everyone for no benefit), etc.
Sorry to be such a downer, but I read some serious delusion in your post. People do avoid upgrading because the newer product is a risk and/or lacks obvious benefits, regardless of any delays caused by procedures in updating systems.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Some posters are asking why it can take years for a rollout to occur so I thought I would share a few observations.
From what I have seen of large (Fortune 500) environments there are a number of reason why a roll out can take a loooonnnnnnngggg time:
1) Scale matters. The more equipment you have to update the longer it takes. Updating desktops for 50K + people can take a long time. In addition, it would probably be too expensive, both in overall cost and lost productivity, to update everyone at the same time.
2) Large institutions tend to be very conservative. They do not want to take risks, so they wait a few years for the technology to stabilize beofre upgrading.
3) Large institutions tend to be cheap. They look at hardware and software as capital investments and want to squeeze every penny out of them. WHy upgrade when everything works.
4) THis is related to point 1) but large environments have a hodge-podge of of equipment, software and protocols. You have not only various flavours of Windows but also various Unices (including Linux and BSD), mainframes (though these usually are not the problem), the odd Mac and even a VMS system or two.
5) Software integration also presents a challenge. Not just MS apps need to be tested and fixed as needed, but also 3rd party software such as SAP, supply chain managment software and sales force automation software. Not to mention a hodgepodge of homebrew applications. Also note that some of your sales force may be 'partners', i.e. independent contractors. They are not a part of your network but must integrate with it. The same is true of suppliers and customers. Throw in some offshoring or outsourcing just to make things a bit more fun.
It is a miracle that anything gets done at all.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Im curious: Where does this leave the blackhats? Are they going to unleash their work as soon as Vista hits the retail market, or are they going to wait until an appreciable number of enterprise environments have deployed it in order to maximize their damage and give Microsoft a black eye?
Personally, I am hoping they do the latter.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
... it's more secure? seriously?It depends on how you re-define secure. Even malware from 2004 will still run.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
For many - desktop management is witch-craft, a black art of guessing and second-guessing. Few companies have a very good handle on their desktop management. The largest companies typically being the worst offenders ....
;-)
If you are a top microsoft account - ask to review their Desktop Maturity Model. Finally Microsoft - and others - put some serious effort into how and why desktops are managed. If you are not a top account and will likely never see the report - simply consider that investments in how you manage and deploy software to desktops has a real impact on the how and when you move to Vista.
This is not to say that everyone should move to Vista now or in a year. I would say that most IT departments are playing a game of chicken with their desktops trying to avoid deployment costs rather than protecting their business. My money is on the fact that many IT managers grew up in a server environment and still haven'd adjusted to the laptop world. There is little benefit to upgrading a desktop machine until you need to. There are significant benefits to updating a laptop - if you can get your hands on it again...
Vista and Microsoft's sizeable investments into desktop management technologies do offer real good reasons to upgrade. The expansion of GPOs, new virtualization capabilities and a more secure platform are just some of the reasons. And let's all leave Aero for the home user for the next few years while the hardware catches up.
Discussing whether or not to upgrade to Vista before discussing the how your company uses and manages its computers (read laptops) is just plain short-sighted... and frankly "par for the course" in an industry where IT still thinks it is a server-oriented world and that desktops can be managed in the same way. The laptop is still only about 10 years old but its time IT stopped managing desktops/laptops like servers. Then and only then, can anyone have an intelligent conversation about moving to Vista. Rationalizing moves based on historical and frankly crappy decisions that leave 98 and 2000 on a desktop simply because it costs less to do so is plain dumb.
Consider where your revenues are actually earned - for most its on a desktop/laptop and should be properly maintained and updated.
My prediction / suggestion is that companies move to Vista in 1-2 years.
Telecommunications giant Ericsson will do a company-wide migration to Vista Q1 next year.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Has nothing to do with Vista or MS. It's an industry Best Practice to wait about 12 months. :\
Quite a few large corporations wait until it's the only OEM choice from vendors like Dell before they start a project to phase out a desktop.
Not sure why this is newsworthy but then very little here is....
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
Vista may be the last wide-scale operating system deployment ever. It requires so much work to regression test all of the in-house and external applications, that some companies may not bother. Instead, you can just use Virtualization, and run all the old applications on the old operating systems in a compatibility mode.
With virtualization, the application only needs to get tested on one operating system. No more O/S upgrades for all those specialized applications.