Vista at Risk of Being Bypassed by Businesses

narramissic writes "With Windows 7 due in late 2009 or 2010, many businesses may choose to wait it out rather than make the switch to Vista. According to some analysts, Vista uptake at this point really depends on how good Vista SP1 (due in Q1, 2008) is. If it doesn't smooth over all the problems, companies are much more likely to stick with XP. And that holds especially true for those businesses that follow the every-other-release rule." Note for Microsoft: Allow us to natively disable trackpads.

Comments

Re:disable trackpads?

[ion.simon.c]

If you take a break from typing, and rest your palm on the portion of the laptop closest to you, you'll move the mouse cursor. Maybe you'll even click a button!

The same things that're bad with XP

[Tony]

Let's see--

0. DRM throughout the system.

1. If a dialog box pops up, you can't move or resize the parent window. WHY ISN'T THIS FIXED YET?

2. It's slow and bloated, even on modern hardware.

3. Its user interface is inconsistent. (OK, KDE and Gnome are pretty bad this way, too, but OS-X isn't, for instance.)

4. DRM.

5. Intrusive security model.

6. Requires re-training of end-users, which is expensive. (Had to add this one, as it's always used as a "reason" to not move to Linux or OpenOffice.)

7. Invasive anti-piracy model.

8. DRM.

9. No compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

As you can see, there are lots of reasons MS-Windows Vista is not good, even on modern hardware. However, if it floats your boat, continue using it.

Re:disable trackpads?

[pionzypher]

Sure, for many the intellipoint is much less intrusive and more accurate. Some laptops have both. While typing the palm can brush the trackpad, inadvertently clicking and shifting the cursor (a pain while typing) of activating gui elements such as a back button. Most 3rd party driver/control apps allow this to be disabled. I've never seen a way to do that in vista natively.

Some won't switch90

[regular_gonzalez]

I'll be surprised if the larger companies switch to Vista. A general rule of thumb is that the larger the company, the slower any software transition. Many reasons for this, from testing compatibility of your apps with the new software, to layers of bureaucracy to go through. As an example, General Electric is roughly 60% WinXP and 40% Win2K, at least in Europe -- I can't speak for other territories. Office 2000 is deployed on appoximately 80% of systems, Office XP on another 15%, and only 5% or so having moved to the 'modern' Office 2003 -- this despite known errors in Excel 2000 with workbooks containing lots of pivot tables and formulae running into the 'out of memory' issue. Given that they are the world's second largest company, and that there's no way they will be upgrading to any new OS without having, say, 3-4 years to test it and get it approved by the powers that be, that's a huge number of sales Microsoft will miss out on. I can only assume that other comperably large companies have similar behavior.