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'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most companies are expecting to deploy WinXP this spring.

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.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[dc29A]

Most companies are expecting to deploy WinXP this spring.

What crackpot moderator tagged this funny? I work for a medium size bank and we are deploying XP right now. It should be finished by early March.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[redstar427]

My Company waited 18 months before we deployed Windows XP, and mostly just on new computers. There were many bugs in XP's initial release, plus it took approximately a year before all of our key applications officially supported XP.

We normally wait until after the first service pack anyway, since Microsoft has a history of releasing too soon.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[LordSnooty]

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)

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[jackharrer]

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.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[tero]

I worked for a fairly large automotive company (you'd know the name).

We started XP deployment for the IT units around March -06 and it's probably just about finished now and moving on to the other parts of the corporation (and ends around next summer I'd guess, not working there anymore).

Will be a long long time before Vista hits their user desktops (probably around 2010, give or take few years), deploying tens of thousands of desktops throughout megacorps is not anything you want to do every year.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[jimicus]

OK, so support has ended for NT. But from the perspective of a large, conservative organisation like a bank, that's not necessarily the end of the world.

Will the desktops magically stop working? No.

Does a migration solve any existing problems which they haven't already solved somehow? Probably not.

What is the risk of sticking with NT 4 on the desktop? No more security updates.

How does that represent a risk? Well, with a reasonably carefully designed network with internal firewalls as well as perimeter ones - probably not a great deal. (Bear in mind that 95% of organisations don't worry that much about internal threats, despite evidence to suggest that they should).

What work is involved in migrating? Checking every application used across the whole company works, and updating/replacing those which don't. Reimaging (and almost certainly replacing) every workstation.

How much would this cost? Hundreds of thousands in man-hours.

Cost/benefit wise, I can see how it would be hard to justify such a project.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[blugu64]

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.

if you're waiting for vista to be stable or secure

[Anonymous Coward]

you'll be waiting a lot more than a year

my firm's Win2k is at SP4 and still isn't

Re:if you're waiting for vista to be stable or sec

[ellem]

I said for a long time, "No, no, Y2K was fine it was Win2K we had all the trouble with."

Re:if you're waiting for vista to be stable or sec

[schnooka_boy]

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.

response

[erbbysam]

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"

Re:response

[Anml4ixoye]

your an employee at Microsoft and you haven't had a chance to use it yourself?

I am an employee at Microsoft, and you better darn believe that they push us hard to make sure we are running Vista. A lot of people have been running it since early alphas, providing a lot of feedback.

I'm a field engineer, so I spend most of my time on site at large customers. A lot of them are excited by the features in it - just like they are excited about the features in .NET 2.0 (and 3.0), VS 2005, etc. I've also worked for shops where we were excited about the latest version of Eclipse, Java 5, Ruby on Rails, etc.

People aren't switching because they don't want to. They aren't switching right now because large companies have lengthy install processes that force things to take a long time. It doesn't matter if it's Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, or a host of other things. I'm sure we can find people running solidly on 2.2 kernels, with not a lot of inkling of jumping to 2.6.

It's just the way big businesses operate, and is generally independent of the actual software being discussed. It's a shame that it always seems to get spun that way.

What's wrong with this?

[Jonah Hex]

One security enhancement in Vista that may be complicated to use is BitLocker, which encrypts the contents of a hard drive so that a stolen laptop can't become a source of pilfered intellectual property. BitLocker's policy of looking for changes in a PC's Basic Input/Output System--the code run by a computer every time it's booted up--may occasionally activate the shutdown mechanism when it isn't needed; for instance, after a systems administrator has upgraded the hard drive. BitLocker "is a very good idea," says the University of Florida's Schmidt. "But it can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

Let's see, you upgrade the hard drive and since the BIOS detects the hard drive has been changed you can no longer access the info on the hard drive. Man that BitLocker is amazing, who would of thought putting a completely different drive in the PC wouldn't let you access the same data! ;)

Jonah Hex

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.

Re:Large vs. small companies

[aadvancedGIR]

Last year, I was working for GE (I think we could all agree it is a BIG company) and we were only moving from NT4 to 2K. BTW, we were allowed to keep two NT4 systems because of a couple of apps that weren't ported yet.

Big corps didn't abandon Win95/98 because they want shiny or powerfull stuff, they did because NT4 or 2K is easier to maintain when you have hundreds of desktops and every up-to-date commercial application run on them without much hassle. They may consider a switch to XP and some already did, but Vista is just too young to be taken seriously by a big corp.

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

Delusions abound

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.