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.'"

Comments

WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[metalcup]

'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, How long did most companies wait before deploying Win XP (or win 2000) after it was released? Is a one year wait 'normal' for IT across companies?

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[will_die]

At the place I use to work at they did install XP until end of 2004.
Current place is planning on doing Office 2007 within a few months however vista will probably be a year plus, and that was with microsoft sending people out here and talking to managers.
While personally I cannot wait for Office 2007, new toys, I am not looking forward to vista for both work or personnal use.

Large vs. small companies

[Josh Lindenmuth]

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.

Re:Large vs. small companies

[tgd]

I think you have it backwards, just based on experience selling software into those sort of companies.

I've got a lot of customers who have a near zero cost going to Vista and Office 2007 as far as licensing is concerned, but they're all talking a year or more to do it and some are saying they may never switch. Why? Enormous retraining and help desk costs associated with the new ribbon UI in Office (which personally I *really* like), and the OS cost is minimal when compared to the new hardware cost and the cost of replacing hardware "in the field".

The place I personally have concern about Vista support very quickly is the exact opposite of what you said -- its the small companies. When you get below 20-30 people, most companies buy whatever computers they can get for the lowest price. They don't have enterprise licenses and will take whatever OS comes on that system... and those systems are going to come with Vista by default. My girlfriend, for example, works at a company of 50 people or so... and when they need a new PC, the IT guy goes down to Best Buy and gets whatever is on sale.

Our 2007 release planning is only targeting Vista for those very small customers (and as such, we're not spending much time looking at it or qualifying it on products that a small customer wouldn't use).

But you make an important point -- small companies (and a lot of big companies) NEVER upgrade OS's. They are still running Windows 98 on systems that haven't died or been replaced for functional reasons... and there's not many functional reasons to replace a 2ghz XP machine for a few years at least.

Let alone large companies

[rf0]

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