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90% of IT Professionals Don't Want Vista

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the oh-so-sad dept.

A survey by King Research has found that Ninety percent of IT professionals have concerns using Vista, with compatibility, stability and cost being their key reasons. Interestingly, forty four percent of companies surveyed are considering switching to non-Windows operating systems, and nine percent of those have already started moving to their selected alternative. "The concerns about Vista specified by participants were overwhelmingly related to stability. Stability in general was frequently cited, as well as compatibility with the business software that would need to run on Vista," said Diane Hagglund of King Research.

7 of 619 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, but what does "considering" mean? by Infonaut · · Score: 4, Informative

    44% are considering moving to another operating system. That's so broad as to be almost useless. "Considering" could mean:

    • We've never even thought about other OSes, and we've just picked up our first copy of LinuxWorld magazine to see what all the fuss is about.
    • We're really annoyed with Vista. We've started paying more attention to those Apple ads.
    • We've started to do some actual cost comparisons between the various options, including Macs, all flavors of Windows, and Linux.
    • We're trying out some Macs on a test basis, and we've installed Linux on an old laptop just to see if it's a viable option.
    • We're in discussions with the folks at Apple Enterprise Sales to see what kind of price they can give us for our exact requirements.
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    Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
    1. Re:Yes, but what does "considering" mean? by porcupine8 · · Score: 5, Informative
      The article breaks it down a little bit more:

      "Clearly many companies are serious about this alternative, with 9% of those saying they have considered non-Windows operating systems already in the process of switching and a further 25% expecting to switch within the next year," the report "Windows Vista Adoption and Alternatives" reads.

      So about a third of that 44% have at least made it past your first two stages, and some of those are in the final stage.

      --
      Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
  2. Re:How many IT professionals... by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Informative

    For expert sexchange, use the cached google page. I haven't found a case yet where the answers weren't shown in the cache.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  3. Vista isn't Stable? by JustASlashDotGuy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Has anyone actually had any stability problems with Vista?

    In our testing, Vista has been perfectly stable. Our only complaint is that 3rd party software hasn't been updated to work with it yet (IE: be it applications such as our Audit software, or Web-based SSL VPN from Cisco ).

    Some users bitched about the new GUI, but these are the same users that complained about XP's different start menu and forced 2000-class on everyone for a while.

    We will happily move to Vista once the 3rd party apps work with it. Blaming Vista because 3rd party apps don't work with it makes as about as much sense as blaming Mac or *nix because, CCH didn't write a tax app for them.

    Vista killed a lot of backward compatibility by making things more secure. Although their implementation of this security leaves a lot to be desired (accept/deny). We have no doubt that the 3rd party vendors will eventually update their apps accordingly.

    Stability issue would definitely cause us to push our deployment schedule back, however right now we are only waiting on the vendors to update their software (all hardware works fine so far).

  4. Re:How many IT professionals... by AbRASiON · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yep, I work for an Australian Govt Dept and we migrated to XP about 3 years ago and XP SP2 about 3 months ago.
    Things are really quite smooth at work.

    We're buying machines under 800$ with monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc and running XP perfectly fine on them.
    If we were to consider Vista, the SOE manager wouldn't put Vista on a box with less than dual core and 2gb of ram (and I don't blame him)
    XP does all we need it to do right now and it does it well.

    Vista would be a support nightmare, I can envision workplaces looking at CTX / Ubuntu setups in the near future definately.
    It's possible we would migrate to Vista but I can't imagine it happening for at least 2 or even 3 years, it'll be 4 years old then - terrible.

  5. Re:Well there you have it by nschubach · · Score: 4, Informative

    Vista Pros: DX10 gaming

    If the latest Crysis Demo has anything to say about it, there goes one of your "Pros."

    http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2209704,00.asp
    --
    Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  6. Re:Well there you have it by Barny · · Score: 5, Informative

    Cons: memory usage...

    As another news site points out and microsoft themselves agree, Vista, on a per box basis, uses more memory to boot than a supercomputer...

    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx

    http://www.microsoft.com/technet/ccs/sysreqs.mspx

    Oh and don't look at the disk space requirements, they are truly frightening :)

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    ...
    /me sighs