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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.'"
I know of one major UK ISP that still has NT4 as standard on their call centre machines and I suspect they're not alone. If it works, and you can still get support for it, why change?
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"
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I think five years is over-egging the pudding somewhat. Still, for these huge banks it must be difficult to roll it out worldwide. Surely that's the issue, rather than waiting to see if it's matured (I think it's gone a bit off now)
Mitchells and Butlers in UK (very big hospitality corp) still uses Win 3.11. In 2006, on 386 and 486 class computers.
And they will not stop because it costs money. And do you have any idea how hard is to update Excel spreadsheets with a lot of version specific scripting? Plus their system is quite complicated and heavily networked.
That's true for many companies. Don't fix it if it ain't broken.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
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.
Yes your absolutely right it's much more probable that massive change will break stuff.
Yes the person who signs off on it would be internal.
But that's not what runs through business-types heads. They are thinking that if it breaks at all then they are in trouble, where as if it breaks with a currently supported hardware/software then they have someone to call, even if vender support can't do anything.
Yes it's illogical, no it makes little to no sence. I agree that just sticking with what works is usually the most inexpensive, and best choice.
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