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Less Than 2 Percent of UK Companies Have Upgraded Windows
Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista. Just shy of 5% said that they have begun a Windows Vista desktop upgrade program. 6.5% said they will upgrade in the next 6 months; 12.6% in the next 12 months; 13% in the next 18 months; and 18% in the next two years. That means that within two years from now, only 56% of survey respondents say they will have upgraded their firm's desktops to Windows Vista. 'In terms of retail sales of Vista in a box, Ballmer said he believes most of that up-tick is concentrated in the first few months of the software going on sale. He doubted that this would carry over into Microsoft's fiscal 2008, which began in July 2007. Analyst estimates for fiscal 2008 growth in Microsoft's client business unit, which includes Vista, is around the 9% mark. Ballmer said that analysts should consider that rather than creating huge spurts of new growth "a new Windows release is primarily a chance to sustain the revenue we have".'"
Will downgrade new machines from Vista to XP or some alternative due to the overhead and application support? I know in my office, Vista has been vanishing, replaced by Linux running Wine for the few Windows apps we actually require.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I still use Windows 2000 as my windows desktop (when i'm not using a *ix system). Nothing wrong with it - no reason to upgrade.
The box said requires Windows 2000 or better so I installed Linux!
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Isn't it obvious that a business would wait until the new system is firmly established before beginning the costly and time-consuming task of upgrading and retraining (to whatever extent that's necessary)?
'In the next six months' is a subset of 'in the next year', which is a subset of 'in the next 18 months', a subset of 'in the next two years'.
So what? In two years will 20% of business be running Vista, or 50%?
The one thing about capitalism is that it is actually not very kind to monopolies. Investors value growth, above all else, and want to put their capital where growth of the business is most. MS can get some rate of return on existing Windows licensing, but, that's not nearly the same as doubling the size of your business from new customers every year or so, and Wall Street knows it. This influences development decisions at companies - there's no point in investing in something, if its not going to move the price of the shares. At this point, Windows is a good business, but all Microsoft can really do in the OS point is stay put or lose.
This is my sig.
Given that there hasn't been a hard push for Vista for U.K. businesses (and that some vendors have been encouraging their customers to wait), this is not a particularly big surprise. It's just too risky while Vista is this new.
If you take a risk with a new operating system at home and it doesn't work out, you may be out some cash. If you did it across your business, you may be out of a job (and a company, for that matter!).
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
The operating system is getting a very bad reception in the press and from the influential types (us guys) in IT
:/
See my thoughts below.
(yes, this is a re-post, unreplied to though and obviously on topic)
When I tried Vista it forced my Dell 8600 laptop to run it's fan in stage 2 of 3 instead of 1/3 that XP does, somewhere CPU use was too high, no matter what I turned off (Aero etc) - on battery or powered.
The interface isn't for me, I couldn't possibly care less about a fluffy 3D interface, I've never used XP's Luna theme and I've been using XP since 6 months after release, I need a functional fast operating system with clever powerful features, I don't 'watch' my OS I use it to get stuff done.
Another reason why I don't want Aero is I do a hell of a lot of RDP'ing and you can't get Aero over RDP.
I would find switching from Vista classic (or XP classic) to Aero, to classic to Aero when switching in and out of my RDP sessions to be very disorientating.
ALSO Aero seemed to offer no real actual benefits to usability, sadly I have to admit after using Mac OSX that the whole expose thing is surprisingly awesome and convienient, that operating system truely makes a mouse user damn near as powerful as a good keyboarder (wow!)
Aero's flip 3D however was ridiculously bad at actually saving you time and effort.
The widget thing / bar on the right was stupid, it should be like Mac OS - it's there, when you need it, hidden and very easily accessable, NOT a bar stuck on the side (auto hide or not, Mac OS wins that)
The search functionality wasn't as good as locate32, I think in file names, not in contents, if I want my CV I search for *resume*.doc on all drives and I'll find it because I memorise the file name (admitedly locate32 isn't native to XP)
Therefore overall Vista didn't offer me anything that honestly helped me.
I used a full retail version of Ultimate and manage to re-produce a bug where connecting to a VPN would instantly blue screen it too (fully patched)
I dislike the smaller 'stylish' min / max / close buttons at the top right, I like them square and easy to find.
Did I mention Windows Explorer sucked? I spend 80% of my time in it, managing files, doing 'stuff' and it's hard to explain but there was a lack of 'lines' and dividers and bars, the data was hard to take in quickly because the interface looked,... weird I couldn't do things quicker with that, the line showing left pane / right pane sucked.
I think (don't quote me) it forced that silly task pane on as well, which is on in XP but disable-able - I don't think you can in Vista (don't quote)
I disliked the breadcrumb style address bar in folders at the top of explorer, admitedly just today someone found a home made patch to disable it but it's not a stock option in Vista and wasn't available when I tried it.
When all is said and done, I would STILL use the thing if someone just made a shell replacement that made it look absoloutely 100% identical to XP classic mode but with a Vista 'engine'. I don't hate DX10 nor do I detest the search, I can always use my own, I don't have to use flip 3d but I do CONSTANTLY use Windows explorer and I need it looking nice, simple and clean to do shit fast, - I felt hamstrung
Didn't we all see a similar article like this back when XP was introduced?
We all know that businesses work on a far slower cycle than the consumer market - hell, it was only two years ago that my work computer (I'm not in IT) moved from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.
Based on that timescale (5 years), I don't expect to move to Vista till 2009...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
What were the adoption figures in the early days of Win2K (which brought native USB support) or XP? Probably just as poor - at least in the case of XP.
None of the companies I have worked for recently have been quick to adopt a new level of Windows. Anyone who expects large companies to leap aboard the Vista bandwagon now is simply deluded. The standard 'wisdom' is that Vista will only start to catch on in a corporate environment once SP1 has been released.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
This past week I picked up my first Vista notebook (on purpose). All our previous workstations were either XP or Vista replaced by XP -- and our clients are also XP. But in the past month, I've noticed quite a few clients running Vista on their notebooks they bring in from home, and that's usually a deciding factor for near-term upgrades.
My company has a "Not till 2008" stance on Vista. I've had horrible experiences with it and third party apps since its release, which is expected. The last week since running Vista, I have to say that the interface does LOOK nicer, but it is counter-intuitive for those who are used to the old keyboard commands to get to places. I'm sure its an easy transition, but I can't figure out the benefits, yet.
Here's the downside: while I don't see any efficiency, the few clients who are choosing to stick with it are doing so because of the cool factor. When I explain to them that the 0.25 second "pauses" for all the flashiness (which can be disabled, of course) add up to a 1/2 hour a day in lost productivity, they don't care: it just looks cool! Engineers and designers we work with hate it, but the managements and CxOs that are our primary market love it. Ugh. Vista: The Ferrari of Operating Systems, and just as costly to repair when it breaks down, often.
"a new Windows release is primarily a chance to sustain the revenue we have"
obviously. there's not really much there in terms of day to day productivity boosters. there's nothing in windows vista that'll change the world or blow my mind. it's pretty easy to to see that this also applies to, for example, office 2007 - how many releases do they need before they get word processing right? the glaring example of this is of course the ribbon bar, imho - a UI change/obfuscation just so that people would have a reason to buy the product again.
I think the problem is that the survey refered to Vista as an 'Upgrade'. Had they asked "What are your firm's plans to make your users' and IT staff's lives miserable by forcing a completely unneeded operating system change onto them?" then they might have gotten a better response.
Nothing personal, it's just that your post is the one I finally decided to comment on. Folks, the subject line is meant to be a terse summary of your post. It is not meant to be the first part of the first sentence in your post.
I had to re-read the sentence fragment above a few times to realize that it was a continuation of what you'd typed in the subject. Many people won't bother and will take that as poor grammar before skipping on to the next message. Free advice: if you want your message to get out, don't do that.
I've been seeing this quite a bit lately and it's irksome. Slashdot has traditionally loosely followed the metaphor of a mailing list, mainly because the crowd that originally made it popular was used to that. There's still a strong influence in that direction. There's no law or rule or FAQ that says it has to be this way, but roughly a decade of practice has made it standard.
Thanks.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Over here, the heads of IT, marketing, and managing director (me) all agree that going to Vista is a downgrade* not an upgrade, so the systems now dual boot with Windows XP and Linux**. Microsoft can shove Vista where the sun doesn't shine.
* Having "played" with Vista on another persons new machine and decent spec, it's terrible.
** After learning about Linux from scratch.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
So they fenced in Micro Channel with all kinds of licenses and patents and expected PC manufacturers to beat a path to their door. They didn't. They worked with EISA and VLB and such until PCI came around, and by then IBM was very much an also-ran in the PC market.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities. I think MS's reach is exceeding its grasp here. It happened to IBM (which *owned* computing) and it's starting to happen to MS. Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility (which is why UAC is so broken) and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped at all - years late).
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
agree.
Form follows function.
At least all the information isn't in the Subject: line with "nc" in the body.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Hmm, my old W2K laptop still gets patches downloaded from MS via Windows Update every now and again. Does this count as support? Or were you referring to some kind of phone support?