Slashdot Mirror
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"
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
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
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.
Random Musings
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.
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.