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Dell Warns of Vista Upgrade Challenges
Mattaburn writes with a story up on ZDNet UK reporting that Dell is warning businesses of the migration challenges that lie ahead as they move to Vista. The article notes what an unusual step it is for a company of Dell's size to be "toning down its sales pitch for Microsoft's Vista operating system" — particularly because "one of the issues the hardware vendor is warning business about is the extra hardware they will need to buy." Quoting: "'They need to be looking at the number of images they will be installing and the size of these images,' said Dell's European client services business manager, Niall Fitzgerald. 'A 2GB image for each user will have a big impact.'"
"We are not here to promote Microsoft and tell people they should buy it. We can show them the advantages of Vista and what they need to put in place to begin to move across. "
"Vista is big and complex and there is a lot to it. It requires a lot of testing. You can't just shut off XP on Friday and start Vista on Monday morning. There will be training. There are things to learn."
and then..
"However, he still thinks that business should go ahead with the migration and not wait for Microsoft to release its first service pack." He wants clients to upgrade to Vista, buy new hardware AND not blame Dell if any thing goes wrong.
By giving an advice which is not intended to generate more sales in the short term, Dell just boosted their credibility with the CEO's, CIO's, CTO's and other non-technical people who'll decide which brand to buy the next time they need to upgrade their 10,000+ PC's. ...Unless they get IBM or MS size, in which case dishonesty isn't punished because people will buy from them no matter what.
The nice thing about big businesses like Dell, is that they have a lot to lose; keeps them at a certain level of honesty.
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While Fitzgerald accepted that some business are holding back from migrating to Vista, he denied that there is a widespread feeling that it is better to wait for Service Pack 1. "I have heard that, and I don't buy it," Fitzgerald said. "It used to be a thing people did, and it might have been the case with, say, Windows 2000, but not now."
I would disagree. My company's IT department waited until they felt that IE7 was stable and patched enough for a rollout to start offering it. Most of the "techies" that I know think the same thing about Vista. That the really big reasons for not upgrading will be fixed after SP1.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
Why do they even want to upgrade?
I'm on XP Pro and I have absolutely no desire or see any reason to upgrade to Vista. And from what I've seen so far about Vista, my next hardware purchase will not have Vista on it.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I'm hard-pressed to think of ANY reason for companies to "upgrade" to Vista.
What does it offer to businesses? The improved security is irrelevant in a corporate environment, because companies have everything locked-down pretty tightly already.
Beyond that, there isn't much Vista does better than XP. At some point, businesses will HAVE to upgrade, of course, but didn't Microsoft say that Vista's successor is only 2 years away? That's not a very long time. I imagine most businesses are just going to stick with XP until they just can't make it work on new hardware anymore.
Microsoft reached a plateau with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It's going to be harder and harder for them to convince people they need a new operating system.
yeah, but don't forget, most people aren't running quake and office at the same time. The graphics complexity is because it has to be very quick at what appears, and it has to retain that quickness regardless of what the user is up to. That becomes a very heavy task with say, 88% cpu load and 10 windows open, and you drag something,etc.
stuff |
By the time Microsoft stops supporting XP, the costs for hardware will probably have dropped to the point where Vista capable hardware is affordable.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Now that Michael Dell is back at the helm, I [hopefully] believe we're seeing a trend of recovery of the respect Dell once commanded. By laying out the facts as they see it, they are helping their customers make better decisions. The respect and loyalty of their customers was once a very strong asset to the company, but at some point in the past, they started squandering that asset by outsourcing support and all sorts of shenanigans that were once the repertoire of their competition. But once Dell started playing the competition's game instead of their own, they started to lose.
I see this as indication that they are reversing course on this and going back to what worked for them in the past... earning customer respect and loyalty.
HP? You mean that same company that releases printer drivers which can't run as restricted user in Windows 2000?
Yeah, I had REALLY expected them to release Vista drivers on time.
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Praytell why a CIO would be looking at a home and home office computer page?
Dell doesn't offer Ubuntu for corporate customers, but they have offered RHEL for quite some time, and don't make the insinuation you pointed out. However, on a 'home and home office' page, this is very important to do, as you can't expect Joe Blow to just know Ubuntu from anything else.
...for companies when Microsoft stops supporting XP? Nothing. Just because M$ stops its support, does NOT mean the OS will stop in its tracks. Companies are still successfully using DOS, Win 3.1, Win 95 and Win 98. These OSes have long been out of support, but in each of their own cases, the task they are accomplishing is probably still be accomplished just as effectively.Bearded Dragon
This looks to be more of a "CYA" statement than anything else, probably a direct result of some of the negative articles that have been written about Vista and Microsoft.
What I really don't understand is why he made the statement in the first place. Dell really isn't over-promoting Vista to its Enterprise/Corporate customers. I recently had to quote out several Dell OptiPlex workstations, and Windows XP Professional is still the default OS licensing option for OptiPlex workstations, which are what most enterprise/corporate customers purchase.
The whole "2 GB" image thing is a bunch of nonsense as well. With every version of Windows that comes out, the default footprint size of Windows on the hard disk has increased as well. I remember installing Windows 95 on 200MB hard disks, with plenty of space left for Office 95 and other applications. Any IT manager in charge of making Windows images knows that a new version of Vista is going to be larger than its XP counterpart. Not only is this true of Windows, but of most software application packages as well.
Overall, Vista does have a lot of new changes. However, there is not too much there holding a customer back from upgrading. Many of the new features in Vista can be turned off and disabled if they can't be tested or get in the way, leaving you with a very XP-like user experience. Vista supports almost all of the group policies that XP does when it comes to being managed through AD. There are several new ways of deploying Vista images as well, with free Microsoft tools, but, there is nothing stopping you from using your existing tools either (Ghost, etc).
This statement looks like Dell spreading is FUD to cover their tracks for another upcoming quarter where they will have poor financial results. They can then blame "slow adaptation of Vista" as a reason for slow hardware sales.
and vista runs perfectly fine on my 3 year old 3.0 Ghz P4 with 1 gb of ram. and an ati 9600 pro video card... and XP ran great on my system back when I got it (P3 1 Ghz, with 256MB Ram). back in 95 people were complaining about having to upgrade their 386s and 486s for windows 95. Is this a new phenomenon to release an operating system that works best on the higher end systems of the day, and not so good on the lower end systems of the day? nope. heck windows 3.1 didn't care too much for XTs either.
>>> No version of Windows could run a current browser usably on this machine.
Are you sure? Windows 98 hacked to run Firefox would probably work too. I use a VM based on that combo for a disposable browser that fits on a small thumb drive.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
MS says support will continue but that leaves two potential problmes relates to what you do when the machines in your company die and need replacement.
1) After December XP not available for sale (volumne license folks may be exempt)
2) Drivers for the new hardware you buy may not work on anything prior to vista.
(some companies have migrated some machine from 2000 to xp because of these reasons.
I think the company that I'm at now has said they paid $250,000 to MS last year to keep distributing back ported versions of patches because we hadn't made the jump to XP SP2 yet. The costs calculated out and keeping the systems at SP1 and paying $250,000 outweighed the cost/benefit of an XP SP2 migration plan. Now that we've cycled out most of the old computers that have less than 512MB of memory, the majority of the systems running now were designed after SP2 rolled out and have been configured adequately and we're proceeding with our SP2 migration before the cut-off date to pay MS for "protection" again.
The post was meant to be funny right?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
2GB of RAM is $80-100 - multiply that by every machine in the company - and that's assuming the motherboards are set for a maximum of 4GB of RAM and can take 1-2GB sticks...
Do you have any idea how many small businesses - not big corporations that routinely swap out machines every three years because they've amortized them out - are running on four, five, six, seven year old machines that are perfectly fine for office workers with XP? Or that almost all office machines not used for video editing are probably running with 512MB of RAM - which is more than adequate for ninety percent of office workers?
Yes, the hardware requirements for Vista are a problem. Every single industry report has said that. Some people have said that the "sweet spot" for Vista performance is FOUR gigs of RAM. Numerous people have complained that it is dog slow on recent machines with 1-2GB of RAM, depending on applications mix, even a minimal applications mix.
Your experience is essentially irrelevant - a single data point at odds with most others reported for months now.
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