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A Majority of Businesses Will Not Move To Vista
oDDmON oUT writes "An article on the Computerworld site quotes polling results from a potentially-divisive PatchLink survey. The poll shows that the majority of enterprise customers feel there are no compelling security enhancements in Windows Vista, that they have no plans to migrate to it in the near term and that many will 'either stick with the Windows they have, or turn to Linux or Mac OS X'. A majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version of Windows. This comes on the heels of a dissenting view of Vista's track record in the area of security at the six month mark, which sparked a heated discussion on numerous forums."
Perhaps this could be because they are already satisfied with the versions of Windows that they have? At least satisfied enough that they will put off upgrading and spending all that money until a few years from now.
Whatever.
I read a statistic a few years ago that said 60+% of companies wouldn't be upgrading to M$' new licensing scheme which had been released at the time. Among other things, it required businesses to upgrade to Windows XP (presumably from 2k).
Guess what? Most did. Linux and OS X are still not viable options for many businesses. We'll see how it goes when Vista finally matures.
Latewire
No one is buying Vista and vendors are revolting. I'm making a list, enjoy!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It didn't suck enough. Stuff works with it, it's secure enough, it's no longer costly, it uses a fraction of the firepower recommended for Vista.
I actually think XP sucked TOO MUCH. In my opinion it ranked only slightly above WinMe in quality. It was Win2k with a Fisher-Price theme and a bunch of cruft that slowed down a 2001-era PC more than it had to. It also had all the same critical security bugs that let worms crawl in from the internet literally within minutes if you didn't have the foresight to keep a well-configured NAT router/firewall in front of it. It was a step BACK from Win2k.
So why does XP look so successful now? Because it was the first NT-based OS with a "home" edition, and NOTHING sucked more than the Win Me it replaced. It was also not different enough to break as many apps designed for the previous versions of the OS (Win2K pro) the way Vista does, so it coexisted in the enterprise better and therefore was accepted sooner in the business world (especially since employers were using the "great" new XP Home).
Furthermore, XP was so horribly sucky and broken that MS was forced to make "service pack 2" as free update. SP2 was such a major enhancement to the OS that in the past it would've been considered another release (that is, an upgrade users needed to pay for). However, XP was so defective that many consumers would've revolted. They also let the bundled browser stagnate so much that they were pushed to back-port IE7 to XP.
So you should say that XP *DOESN'T* suck enough...now. The originally released XP in many respects was a piece of garbage. MS was forced to offer free incremental upgrades over time that added up over time to significant improvements, and hardware improved over that time too. Today, XP looks pretty snappy and indeed is "good enough". And, we are now conditioned to "incremental improvements" being free and many feel that Vista, from a user perspective, is like "XP SP3", unless you have a snazzy new machine that can run the new aero glass interface well (and what PRACTICAL use does that offer anyways?).