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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.'"
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The others I understand, and if Quickbooks in particular is broken I can't upgrade our machine (natch; I wanted the Media Centre stuff for my 360).
But why would you care that the XP version of an AV product doesn't work on Vista? Surely there are enough differences between the OSes that you'll need a new virus scan?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
An OS that wont run Notes should be at the top of every IT manager's list, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't see how the slow adoption of Vista is any different from previous Windows releases, except that the consumer version is being delayed a month rather than be released in tandem. The DoD only truly migrated fully to XP early last year; no corporation with a large IT infrastructure is going to be eager to lead the charge without concrete proof that upgrading will benefit them in the long term.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
Some corporations are still running Windows 98. Many are on Windows 2000. Very rarely will a corporation migrate to a one month old operating system - they'll trial it in very select areas to shake out the bugs and tech support issues they are likely to face and then deploy 6-30 months later (depending on the date of their upgrade cycle).
Vista *will* roll out to businesses, but don't expect it to overtake XP any faster than XP overtook 2000, or 2000 overtook 98, etc.
And Notes won't run? Damn - I'm upgrading NOW.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Because we all know that corporations love to throw out their existing infrastructure and redeploy with newly released software.
Well, the simple fact of the matter is that XP/2000 work just fine for a corporate environment. It's not like Vista will add any more stability over what's already available. When 2000/XP came out they were worlds beyond what 9x offered and a little better than what NT offered.
There's no need to switch when everyone's applications are running w/o too much issue and there are too many questions that need to be answered about how the new OS will operate.
That and I'm not sure people want to have to retrain their staff to use the "ribbons" of Office 2007 that Bill is so excited about.
IMHO, businesses aren't in a rush to upgrade to Vista because of the incompatabilities mentioned in the article, and the fact that upgrading costs a lot of money. Some of which, these businessess don't have, or weren't planning on using for a Vista upgrade.
If I may speculate on behalf of the businesses, with all the applications that they likely use on a daily bases not working, and the increased cost of upgrading (which you then have to pay off/make up in increased profits), they'd rather wait until most of these problems are fixed in the operating system they're going to pay for. You're probably thinking "well, there's no time like the present", and you'd be wrong. Businesses stand to loose a lot of money if the applications they rely on (and perhaps weren't mentioned in the incompatability list, but also have limited/no functionality) don't work until 6 months later when MSFT releases an update to fix all (nice dream, mind if I join?) the applications compatability issues.
Businesses would rather stick with what they've got right now for the next little while. It doesn't cost them as much to maintain an OS thats already been installed and is functioning, as it would to install Vista, and deal with all the resulting problems. It doesn't matter to them if they wait an extra 6 months to upgrade, because it will mean less loss in revenue.
Just my opinion.
And honestly, people can argue until they're blue in the face about how XP is fine, but the reality is that it's five years old, technology has changed and a new OS is necessary.
Does this guy even know what an OS is? There is no reason why new technology can't be supported in an "old OS". Especially if the "new OS" is basically an update of the "old OS".
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
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. Dude... Umm... Sorry to interrupt but there's an express courier from Microsoft at the front desk. He claims he's got a complementary laptop for you.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Perhaps someone who's posting a piece on how they've had no trouble installing/running Vista has their own agenda?"
Perhaps someone who's posting a piece on how they've had no trouble installing/running Linux has their own agenda as well. Or not.
The point is that on Slashdot saying something postive about MS is instantly suspect, but saying something postive about Linux isn't.
This is disappointing because nerds are supposed to be about logic and critical/scientific thinking, but we can be as blind as the worst sports fans when it comes to our sacred choices of technologies.
Do any companies ever upgrade immediately? It's stupid from the point of view of application support (for any OS upgrade/update there'll almost always be a few issues to be fixed) and there's no clear advantage. My last job was working in an office at a major company, yet they only upgraded from NT to XP in late 2004/early 2005, at the same time as they upgraded all the hardware. That's a little over 3 years after XP's release. I expect the same will happen with Vista. The next time they replace the workstations in 3-4 years they'll shift to Vista aswell. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than switching now and having to upgrade the hardware at the same time.
And of course this doesn't even begin to account for legacy software. In that job we were still using software originally written and deployed in the 70's, software that's damn hard to replace because the original COBOL coders are all long gone and nobody really has any idea how to migrate properly. Ridiculous amounts of money (millions) were spent getting this stuff to run on XP through emulators, you can be damn sure they're not gonna want to spend that kind of money again to get it to run on Vista until they absolutely have to.
It's a similar situation for home users. Very few people actually go out and buy Windows, they just use whatever OS comes with the hardware when they buy that. Given that computers are reaching a point where you no longer need to buy a whole new one every few years, is this going to affect the uptake of Vista? I mean I'm currently writing this on a Athlon XP 2400+, it's five years old yet it can easily accomodate any task I can throw at it. I'd say it's still got another couple of years in it yet, so what exactly happens to Vista's sales if everyone but the hardcore-gamers buy new systems running Vista on a seven year turnaround?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.