Now Is Not the Time for Vista

narramissic writes "With nearly a month of Vista availability behind us, businesses don't seem to be in any rush to take the leap. An article on ITworld cites two significant reasons for the foot-dragging. First, Microsoft's case-by-case approach to Vista patches, which is leaving some problems unpatched until after the consumer release in January. Second, application (in)compatibility. From the article: 'Some of the applications that still aren't compatible with Vista include IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes e-mail and collaboration suite; Cisco Systems Inc.'s and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.'s VPN clients; Intuit Corp.'s accounting software QuickBooks 2006 and earlier versions; and anti-virus (AV) software from Trend Micro Inc.'" '

Comments

we upgraded

[CDPatten]

I have a small client (75 users) and we are on a five year plan for new hardware... it was up in October. We bought new Dell's and Vista Business in November, and rolled them out last week.

In the Ad industry we have to use lots (7) of custom apps for Media, Accounting, and Shipping. We had 2 problems. 1 wasn't the program but the installer didn't detect the correct OS. It was a small app so we just copied it over with its .dlls. The other problem was solved perfectly by running the shortcut in compatibility mode.

As for the users: very happy with Vista and Office 2007. I mean, really happy. I'm sure it helps that they now have big flat screen monitors and faster computers, but we are getting lots of good feedback at the agency.

The OS: We wrote a few custom gadgets to automate a few tacks in about 10 minutes a piece, and people love them. We don't do the indexed search for network shares so people really aren't talking about that, but believe it or not, they love the animations and the "pretty" stuff. We never had a problem with XP crashing or anything so the fact that Vista is stable doesn't really change much for us.

For anyone thinking about Office 2007: It went over huge here, between the ribbon and all the visual additions (especially smart objects). Actually our Accounting department is loving the new excel, and our president is pretty excited about the toys in powerpoint. Word seems to be liked but that is the one we hear least about.

From my perspective: The Vista imaging software and new group policy is awesome. We did the rollout over the weekend, and it went off without a hitch. I'm not really giving MS credit for that, we worked on the image for a few weeks, but we are very happy so far.

Same with NT, Win2K, XP. Not a big deal.

[dpbsmith]

Hardly news. This should not be read as a mass rejection of Vista, just an indication that corporation IT departments do their job in a reasonably competent and responsive way.

It takes about a year-and-a-half before a corporation that fully intends to transition to the new OS is ready for the "rollout." Typically this involves a good deal of preparation so that everyone in the company gets their new PC, their training classes, their new application versions, and their direction for migrating at about the same time.

At the introduction of every major Windows upgrade, the same things have happened: Gartner et al have told corporations to take their time adopting the new OS, and corporations, whether because they listen to the analysts or for their own reasons, have done so.

Not entertaining anytime soon

[div_2n]

With the support of the CFO and CEO, I've developed the policy that we won't even entertain Vista until a minimum of SP1 and a year of full release has passed. In other words, we won't even begin testing until January 2008. I doubt our company is alone.

I don't doubt Vista will make some traction, but it seems to me that the likelihood is in a very slow adoption rate. By the time businesses are ready to take it seriously, many companies may be very open to alternatives that will have matured quite nicely. After all--with quite a few perfectly good computers sitting around that won't run Vista either at all or very well, why should we ditch those resources when we can reallocate them as a Linux desktop?

Re:Cisco is to blame, not Microsoft...

[Lxy]

Regarding application compatibility, this is the fault of the vendor, not Microsoft. The vendors had well a year or more to get their stuff working with Vista while it was in beta.

According to several vendors, the IP stack kept changing throughout the beta process. After several futile attempts to write code against the stack, most vendors have had to wait until final release before building their products. Novell coems to mind, I'm sure Cisco and others are in the same boat.