90% of IT Professionals Don't Want Vista

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.

Comments

Well there you have it

[drspliff]

Conclusive proof that Vista has flopped :) Unless the survey was rigged, but CmdrTaco wouldn't be that naive would he?...

Re:Well there you have it

[abigsmurf]

Just like XP flopped when people were complaining for ages that thousands of applications wouldn't work on it, very few DOS programs wouldn't work and it seemingly didn't offer enough benefits to counter-act this?

One thing that always bothers me with surveys like this is the "have you considered moving to linux/apple" type questions. That's an extremely vague question that can get a 'yes' that can have any meaning for "I've heard a few people talk about linux, I should see what it is" to "we have drawn up a feasibilty report and are waiting for a decision from upper management".

Re:Well there you have it

[Ajehals]

I have been having this very discussion with trifish as a part of another story.

Trifish would argue that the security benefits alone are sufficient to justify businesses to upgrade. Personally I would say that Vista may be attractive to new businesses* but not ones with an existing investment in XP or 2000, not because the security is lacking, it is an improvement over XP (especially on x64 hardware) but with all the other issues its just not justifiable.

Vista may become viable as hardware becomes cheaper or if there is a sufficiently large threat to XP that is left unpatched but does not affect Vista.

* (but they should be looking at the alternatives regardless, see what my company tries to do..)

Re:Well there you have it

[SatanicPuppy]

The problem is, we've all spent too much time securing our Windows networks already...I don't remember the last time I had a virus take down more than a couple of machines, and the last time we had one at all was more than a year ago. Everything is isolated, anti-virused, monitored...All our email is filtered through a third party that strips out anything that looks weird.

If you're not having security problems, then saying, "This is more secure" doesn't cut any slack, and it sure as hell doesn't make it worth it to switch to a completely new system.

Re:Well there you have it

[uncoveror]

I had my Lenovo 3000 N100 which came preloaded with Vista about a week, and it crashed hard. It could not boot up. I thought it would be no big deal. I removed my hard drive, backed it up and reloaded. It was a big deal. Thanks to user account control. I was locked out of all the data I had hoped to save, including my outlook mail and contacts therein. Permanently gone and unrecoverable. The next problem was slowness. This laptop replaced an old HP with an Athlon XP 1500+ with 768MB of SDRAM. In spite of having a Dual core CPU and 1GB of DDR2, the new one was slower than the old one, and using an SD card for Windows Ready Boost made no difference. I had to upgrade to 2GB just to make it usable. It is still too damn slow. If I did not need to provide support to poor suckers who had Vista foisted on them, I would upgrade to XP and not look back. Vist should have been scrapped. It is worse than ME.

Re:Well there you have it

[poetmatt]

The only reason Microsoft has DX10 for vista and why DX10 adds almost nothing (few shader effects and as you note its not groundbreaking like DX8-> DX9. or DX7->DX8) is because it enables graphics memory virtualization which is a hotbed of patent issues right now (see: novel microsoft patent issues).

I personally feel that People use XP because its easily pirated and not a complete memory hog (and almost no games run on Linux well as of yet still) and only UT and quake are the only "masses" games that run natively & well. People with an intermediate computer knowledge typically have been asking me how to convert to linux, thinking it will be more complicated, and are usually set at ease with the simple installation/wealth of software available. Overall if Linux worked for gaming, I don't think windows would be used at all as there would be heavy consumer pressure away from it.

Re:Well there you have it

[tallguywithglasseson]

Does anyone see any real benefit for a business user to switch to Vista?

If (if) the improved security claims pan out, the amount of money you'd save on repairing infected clients would be a benefit.
The new version of SMB could* mean better performance for your clients' shared drives - if you have file servers running an updated Windows Server 2003 (*I have not tested this).

That's about all I can think of.
You can put me squarely in the 90%.
All our applications tested fine in Vista, but that's not a benefit, that's just the absence of a big problem. If we do move to Vista, it would be an incremental thing - newly purchased PCs and laptops only. That's a pain because now you've got to support 2 different client OSes - this was much less an issue when moving from Windows 2000 to XP because they were so similar.
I can't imagine trying an actual migration of all existing XP (and in our case, some old straggling Windows 2000) clients to Vista - both for post-implementation performance issues and the pain of doing the actual migration. Not to mention I'm sure we've got a few clients that wouldn't meet even the Vista minimum requirements.

Re:Well there you have it

[LingNoi]

DX10 gaming (very nice).

Based on what? Your experience programming in it? Using the new shader techniques?

Or is it just looking at a new games graphics and saying "Oh wow that's all because of DX10"

The rest of the points pose similar questions, especially the one about Linux drivers... ATI or Nvidia? Which Distro? Which Driver version? I've never had any issues with the Nvidia driver myself so your comment seems very incorrect to me.

I see a reason for businesses to switch to Vista, especially if you play games at work.

Because playing games at work is top priority for most companies...

Re:Well there you have it

[Ajehals]

100% correct (take a look at this thread.).

For the home user Vista has many potential attractions, not least of which is that it will likely arrive on a new PC bought, not because vista is available but because a new computer is required. For business the thought of having to replace a huge number of machines, make changes to various other IT systems, solve any incompatibilities, deal with driver issues, retrain staff and then end up with an IT system that may or may not be more secure than the current one (as you said measures have already been taken) and one that will in all honestly probably deliver little or no productivity benefits, is simply repugnant. This is even more so the case since there are other OS's with similar or better levels of security that run very well on older hardware and are considerably cheaper to acquire and potentially cheaper to maintain, sure they have similar issues with regard to training and compatibility, but if you are throwing out everything else anyway, why not go in favour of something that will at least save you money in terms of licensing and hardware requirements (obviously this aproach is not suitable for all, but then those that is is not suitable for Vista as also not suitable.

Re:Well there you have it

[Anonymous Coward]

>> If you're not having security problems, then saying, "This is more secure" doesn't cut any slack, and it sure as hell doesn't make it worth it to switch to a completely new system.

This, incidentally applies also to all of these :

- Linux is more secure (who cares on an home desktop ? only people who already have a secure windows)
- Linux is more stable (who cares on a desktop if it stays up 832days without reboot against the 412 of XP ?)
- MacOS/X is more user friendly (does it matter among those who already know how to work around in Win ?)

Reality :

1) Inertia is king.
2) XP is not best in any field, probably, but is smooth enough. Probably, probably not, the best package around overall, for sure not the best in any single category except app compatibility. For sure good enough.
3) 1+2 = even Microsoft has trouble beating XP because, really, finding something which *is worth* to be improved on any 1st class OS is hard.

Re:Well there you have it

[bl8n8r]

> I don't remember the last time I had a virus take down more than a couple of machines

Do you mean the last one you caught was a year ago, or that your metrics date back a year and show remediation and assesment has been effective?

A lot of the windows exploits have moved* beyond the brain-dead slammer worm that let you know something was hosed. From my experience, many IT shops haven't got the resources, software or experience to stay ahead of the technical level of the malware that is coming down the pike. It seems to me that the malware authors have been going to school while the IT industry has been playing hookey. I'm not picking on Windows even though it makes a great target; Linux, Mac and the other alternatives need to be thinking about how userland can be exploited by the same means - otherwise, we've merely traded one sinking ship for another.

[*]
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2205606,00.asp
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Eighty-percent-of-new-malware-defeats-antivirus/0,130061744,139263949,00.htm

Re:Well there you have it

[UnknowingFool]

Just like XP flopped when people were complaining for ages that thousands of applications wouldn't work on it, very few DOS programs wouldn't work and it seemingly didn't offer enough benefits to counter-act this?

That is one complaint. Stability is, however, the major complaint. Second is backwards compatibility. Businesses had choices with XP; some businesses use XP Pro but they had Win2K (released 1 year earlier) as an option. With Vista, there is no other choice but going back to XP (released 5 years earlier) if you want to stay with Windows. You have different versions but they all suffer from the same issues.

As for benefits, XP did bring major upgrades to DOS based Win9X especially from a business standpoint. There was no such thing a group policy with Win9X, for example. The problem with Vista for businesses is that XP SP2 is good enough. Businesses unlike gamers need to really justify a new OS. Stability coupled with backwards compatibility are major deal breakers. Maybe that will change with Vista SP1.

Re:Well there you have it

[drsmithy]

Why would a business want to buy additional hardware for this upgrade?

They wouldn't - but that wasn't the issue. The issue was the implication that hardware for Vista is (more) expensive.

They wouldn't need to if they didn't upgrade.

Actually they probably will, once the lease on their existing hardware runs out.

If a business has thousands of desktops from a few years ago, say 1.8Ghz CPU, 512Mb RAM, 40Gb hard disk etc... a bog standard corporate desktop, its not cheap to replace all that kit in one go with something vista will run on, its much easier (and more cost efficient) to upgrade as stuff breaks and then at some distant point in the future upgrade to vista because all your equipment is capable of running it and it fits in with the other infrastructure life cycles that you are working within.

Which is exactly how a migration to Vista will be done, just like it was exactly how the migrations to XP, 2000, NT, etc, etc were handled before that.

Why anyone thinks it odd that businesses aren't migrating to Vista immediately - or tries to imply it has problems because of that - is beyond me. Most companies, running a ~3yr hardware cycle, won't even be _considering_ a Vista rollout until mid 2008 at the earliest. This is completely and utterly independent of any technical issues - real or imagined - that exist.

Microsoft knows this (which is why aberrations are worth talking about). Anyone with any real experience in corporate IT knows this. The only people who seem not to know it are the anti-Microsoft trolls on Slashdot who, for some reason, think because corporate IT departments are following the same rollout methodology they've been using for the last couple of decades, it means Vista has problems.

How many IT professionals...

[Winckle]

want windows at all?

Re:How many IT professionals...

[AbRASiON]

Honestly, XP has it's flaws but a fully patched machine is a fairly reliable box overall.
It still has windows general bullshit but considering the age, there's so many great newsgroup / forum and google search* posts for support, most issues are bound t be easy to fix.

* fuck experts exchange, get off the google search results.

Re:How many IT professionals...

[rbochan]

...there's so many great newsgroup / forum and google search* posts for support...

Wait.
A bit OT, sure... but hasn't that been a rather large argument against adopting Linux? That you had to go to some newsgroup/forum/etc. to get support?

Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[Corporate Troll]

In the end Vista will be inevitable. Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore. (Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line) Believe me, it will happen, eventually. Give it another year or two. I didn't switch to WinXP before SP2 was very mature (Fall 2005). Before I was Win2k all the way, and before that NT 4.0....

Try running NT 4.0 these days... Won't get you very far. That's the future of Windows XP. They are going to drop it like a hot potato.

Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[Silver Sloth]

I think you're missing the point.

It may well be wishful thinking amoungst the Linux faithful but there is a growing impatience with the endless Microsoft upgrade cycle. IT professionals are incresingly saying 'Why upgrade? We gain nothing and lose lots.' I have no major issues with XP, it does everything I want it to, but I will have to upgrade because of all the reasons you state.

So, put yourself in the shoes of a CIO faced with replacing hundreds, or even thousends of PCs because they need to be upgraded to run Vista, and the difficulty of going to the board once again with a request for huge amounts of cash for very little gain, and then maybe Linux starts to look a little better.

Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[Zeinfeld]

It may well be wishful thinking amoungst the Linux faithful but there is a growing impatience with the endless Microsoft upgrade cycle.

Oh yes, people are equally furious about 1) Microsoft continuously introducing new versions and 2) Microsoft not providing the features they want and need.

And whats more its the same people and they don't use Windows anyway.

Vista runs just fine. I have been running it since May and not had any problems apart from a couple that are pretty squarely third party issues. Vista is fast and slick on my hardware.

Admittedly I would probably not recommend a Vista upgrade but thats mostly because the cost of the Vista upgrade is so close to the cost of a new machine anyway. I have two vista machines and three XP machines in the house. One of those is a three year old Vaio that is dropping to pieces anyway. Another is a Dell box I paid $500 for including the monitor and the other is the machine I use for surfing while I am working out on the treadmill.

Why pay $160 to upgrade when the machines are 2 years old and I can have a whole new machine thats much faster for $500? I certainly would not consider buying a new XP machine though.

The industry does not want Vista whine is wishful thinking. Many companies took two years or more to roll out XP. If you have a hundred or so users you would be a fool not to adopt a wait and see approach. But that does not say anything about the quality of the product.

Vista has higher hardware requirements than past versions. That does not make them unreasonable requirements. But most IT depts want to support a single version of the O/S so that means that they can't do the upgrade till they can afford to end-of-life the legacy machines that don't support the new version.

Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[Corporate Troll]

It's already happening with laptops that came preinstalled with Vista. It's very hard or impossible to find drivers to make a working XP install on those.

Nothing new.

[Bruzer]

I read the same kind of article when XP came out. People didn't want to leave 2000 to upgrade to XP, and as we all know that happened.

Articles like this don't offer too much insight. IT workers are resistant to change... BIG surprise there.

Re:Nothing new.

[GregPK]

Different though, when 2000 came out it was pretty much everything Microsoft claimed and any transition to it was done with minimal compatability issues. Often times more things worked better after the switch. With XP, in the early years anyways there were some compatability issues. But again and overall users were happier in XP. VISTA comes out, users make the switch and the interface confuses everyone, Including the IT pro's. It has driver issues and backwards compatability issues. Even HP's own basic business systems have more compatability Errors with Vista than with XP. In other cases the interface is easier. But, to do anything advanced requires relearning how to a number of menu's. Things take longer...

Re:Nothing new.

[porcupine8]

Of course, back then, the Apple alternative was a little thing called 10.1 that seemed somewhat interesting, but had yet to be proven (and 10.0 had not exactly been amazing), and most of the apps had to be run in Classic Mode.

Now, the alternative is an OS that rivals Vista in the amount of hype it's gotten and at a bare minimum at least has support for MS Office and Adobe CS products (and has a couple different ways to run your XP/Vista programs if you really need one or two of them).

And, of course, Linux has come a long way as well - in 2001 it definitely was not user-friendly enough to be seen as a viable alternative for a lot of companies. Now not only has it improved its interface in a lot of ways, it has a much better software selection - a lot of office drones can get by just fine on OO.o instead of Office, people are using Firefox instead of IE even in windows, etc.

Everyone keeps saying "the same thing happened with XP" - but it's a different world now than it was when SP came out. No, I don't think Vista is going to be a MS-crushing flop. But when everything shakes out a couple years down the road, I think that the market share figures will definitely look a little different, even if MS still has a majority share.

Re:Nothing new.

[Firethorn]

Adoption wasn't as fast as MS would have liked, and you can see attempts at keeping MS from repeating XP all through Vista's launch.

And I think that this is killing them. In attempting to make Vista *NEW* and *REQUIRED* and *DIFFERENT*, they broke a number of things, introduced a bunch of annoyances - killing any desire many people have for upgrading... DRM is only one of the annoyances - why would you set up an OS to work *worse* than its predecessor?

Sure, it's prettier - but there are still lots of people who the first thing they do on a new box is set the theme to 'windows classic'. Partially as a consequence, it's also slower - enough slower that a number of people have remarked that their new vista machine is slower than their 2-3 year old XP box.

Menus are all different - I've always hated how MS tends to move settings I need to change deeper into the menu. I mean, WTF do I need a 'wizard' that consists of one screen where I hit next to get to the actual menu?

WinNT was really showing its age when 2k came out, and 98 wasn't an enterprise class system. In comparison to NT/98, 2k was a combination of the best features of both as far as I was concerned*.

XP, at least post SP1, was much the same. I don't have the same feeling about Vista, seeing as how XPSP2 installs still go smoothly; software supports it, etc...

If Vista wanted to be better, serious improvements in interface would have been nice. Improved multimonitor support, the flash cache idea would have been great if other performance hits didn't wipe out the benefits, some general code cleanup, etc...

*May ME burned righteously in hell.

More legacy than stability

[techpawn]

Honestly for me, the number of applications that would just stop working or would need to be coaxed to run on Vista that would make it unstable is far more of an administrative headache than I know I'm willing to deal with at HOME let alone from Joe User who know how to turn a computer on and swears that when an icon is gone the application is missing...

Different things

[Slashidiot]

It's different what IT proffessionals think to what will happen. Who makes choices? The guy with the money, and withouth the knowledge. It's important to see that distinction, as it will take a loooong time to convince the people with the money that microsoft is not the best option. But at least it feels good that almost unanimously the IT people feel Vista is crap.

90% of IT professionals doesn't want anything NEW

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Any good IT professional lives by the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' adagium, so what's new?

Re:XP was a different story...

[jimicus]

Twaddle.

Any significant IT department will either order systems pre-imaged to their requirements (Dell offer such a service), or re-image systems with their own company-specific image before they're sent out.

The big killer has always been driver support. Once the likes of HP, Lenovo and Dell are shipping PCs with significantly better driver support in Vista than in XP, then we shall see more adoption of Vista.

Re:90% of IT professionals doesn't want anything N

[elhondo]

I've only been in IT for around 15 years, but I've NEVER met an IT professional who didn't want to deploy something new. Not everything, but something. To a large degree, it's sort of why they pay us.

Uh...No.

[SatanicPuppy]

I've been working IT for a long time, and I've NEVER liked a new operating system. New == Problems.

Unless there is a damn compelling reason, I'll stay with what is working and working well until the new thing has been out for a good while...Hell, I know shops that are still migrating to XP and while I think they're behind the times, they're not alone in that.

If you migrate up just because something new is out...That's just foolish. You're adding a fricking ton to your workload, and for no good reason.

Re:Uh...No.

[WPIDalamar]

I think the biggest problem with Vista is there is no compelling reason to upgrade for business users.

It's prettier. But that's about it.

The disconnect between developers...and everyone!

[BigCanOfTuna]

I contract for an organization who's core business is developing software for the stock markets. While we use Linux in our test, staging, and production environments, I am constantly asking myself why the hell I am stuck developing on a laptop with XP? Why the hell am I stuck trying to emulate our Linux environment with Cygwin? Why are we maintaining two sets of scripts to make sure everything works (bash/batch)? Why am I forced to run performance crippling virus software? There are a number of supposed reasons. You've heard them before: "We need Windows for Outlook and Office" - I'm a developer, I need EMail and I hate documentation. Please let me use Firefox and if need be, I'll use OpenOffice. "The learning curve of Linux is too big for some developers" - Fire them, or give them different jobs. Why are you wasting my time, and others who could be more productive because of one or two nine-to-fivers? "Management of Linux would be more difficult for network support" - What you really mean is your support staff has let their skill set elapse and they have focused on Windows technologies. I'm sorry, but fire these people too. Your organization is being held hostage and is losing money by inept people.

What's to discuss?

[talexb]

Feh. Consider:

1. XP is fine -- a remarkable achievement, actually -- a Microsoft operating system that's finally releatively stable. Well, they've had a few years to get it right. And getting an OS right is really, really tough.

2. Vista requires top of the line hardware to run decently -- dual core processors and 2G RAM. We had the exact same discussion over ten years ago when Windows 95 came out -- Microsoft swore it would run fine in 4M memory, and it never did -- 8M was better, and 12M was decent.

3. Vista is still not stable -- it is, after all, a 1.0 release. Geeks consider anything 1.0 from Microsoft a bit dodgy.

4. All current applications run fine on Windows XP, but may or may not run under Vista. No surprise there.

5. A recent article said that XP was still outselling Vista three to one on new system installs. It's not a tough choice: do you want the stable option that runs more quickly and is more compatible, or would you prefer the unstable option that runs more slowly and is less compatible? Hmmm. But the new one has such pretty pictures! Shiny! Shiny!

Sorry. Got carried away for a moment there.

I think Microsoft's suits need to just suck it up and keep selling Vista quietly, and give the engineers time to get the code right. The hardware will catch up to Vista, and the engineers will get the bugs sorted out. In a couple of years XP will be old hat.

I just wish they'd been able to get more of the cool stuff like WinFS into the latest version of Windows. It seems that this version is just new wrinkles in the sheet metal, and nothing much else. Sigh.

So I Was a Vista Skeptic...

[Bilby Baggins]

Basically from Vista's release announcement I've been saying that it hasn't had enough time in dev, it was released too early, and that Microsoft didn't get around to doing any of the things that they said they would do with Vista- basically, that Vista is to XP what Millennium Edition was to 98SE- a backslide. I tried to get one Vista laptop to connect to our campus wifi with no luck, and basically had a hell of a time navigating the few Vista systems that came around.

When it came time for me to get a new laptop, I desperately wanted to get one with XP, an operating system that has mostly had the major issues worked out of it, and that I knew well inside and out. But my business partner made the good point that, as IT Consultants, we were going to have to support it, so we should know it, whither or not we really like it. And (of course) the best way to get to know an OS is to live with it.

So I've been running Vista for about a week so far, with heavy use both plugged in and on battery, and I have to say this (in bold in italics so you get the idea of how surprising this was to me... ) I'm pretty impressed with Vista. YES, I know i has problems, some of which are VERY aggrivating. It shows as using a lot of ram, and it does tend to bother one overly much while installing software and doing other system tasks. BUT- for the avarage user, these warnings will help to make it harder for malware vendors to install their junk software, for even if the spyware/adware uses an IE exploit to enter the system, if they are trying to hide behind the vague shell of being valid software their install will cause a warning to pop up for the user. While this doesn't stop a user for still allowing it, it DOES make them aware of the problem- an improvement. to be sure.

I also have noted that yes, Vista DOES look a lot like Windows XP professional in drag. The menus are confusing... but only for someone used to 98/2k/XP. Oh, and you can make Vista behave and look quite a bit like XP, as well. Personally I've left the pretty stuff on- it's not too bad looking, and hell, if Apple can get away with a pretty UI, why not Microsoft?

Vista has it's share of problems, but overall I'd say that it will be an improvement over XP- once some of the worst issues are taken care of.

Personally, I've not had any software compatibility issues yet, and have installed old versions of Winamp, CDex, and even Total Annhiliation on the system with nary an issue.

I'm NOT saying that it's perfect, nor that it's ready for a large-scale enterprise roll-out. Realistically speaking, XP is a better platform anyhow- hell, most corporate networks could still be using terminals for much of their work! But it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft.

Please note that not only did I post this from my work OSx machine, I'm also in charge of maintaining 200+ desktops with OSs ranging from Win98SE to OS9 and a couple variants of linux. So i'm not a total OS/UI noob ;)

When playing games at work is a valid reason

[tepples]

I don't see a reason for businesses to switch to Vista, unless you play games at work. Does anyone see any real benefit for a business user to switch to Vista? If your company develops software for Windows OS that will be made available to the public, you need Windows Vista in order to test your product software for compatibility. If your company publishes reviews of proprietary works such as video games designed for Windows Vista, you need Windows Vista to run these works.

Re:When playing games at work is a valid reason

[shinmai]

In both of your examples, I see no reason for the whole computer infrastructure of the company to get the upgrade. Some testbed-machines should suffice just fine. It's like with web-development (that I'm much more familiar with), I have various different browsers installed on a handfull of machines, but I only use one browser to read slashdot, the others are there just for testing...

Re:Vista is MS's fastest product launch ever

[Volante3192]

I remember those numbers being posted before about exceeding XP sales.

If I think back, wasn't that because people were redeeming all their Vista vouchers that they accumulated the past four months from OEM systems? Remember, the whole "Free Vista upgrade!" deal?

Yet something seems different this time

[WebCowboy]

Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore.

You know, those are some of the exact reasons Vista hasn't gained the traction in enterprise environments that MS would like:

* There is hardware out there with drivers not available anymore except for WinXP or earlier, because it is just a bit too old for MS or the vendors to care (in the latter case, it is often the issue of being economically unjustifiable to support products recently discontinued on very new OSes).

* Important programs are XP-only, and will not be Vista-ready for a long time, if ever. My employer's current products won't be ALL Vista-ready for another year. Furthermore we have some applications in "extended support" (not the term our marketing dept. uses, but basically software that is not being sold to new customers ore being upgraded but is still in support mode--we are legally obligated in some cases to support our pruducts for upwards of 20 years). That software will NEVER be Vista-ready but could be used well past 2010.

* Vista and its updates occasionally break application software and in some cases the lack of MS' "critical updates" is something to look forward to. The more mature the software, the more stable it is. It is more difficult to hit a moving target when it comes to making your applications reliable. In the last few years I've personally had to deal with a couple of major bugs in our customers' systems that were a direct cause of a bug fix. We had to go to great lengths to convince MS that Windows was no longer behaving as documentation said it was (ie. we were not relying on previously buggy behaviour). Subsequently a hotfix was released to fix the bug introduced by a previous hotfix that fixed another bug.

This is bad enough in a business enterprise system. With the longer product cycles and more demanding (reliability-wise) industrial environment the issues with Vista are still intolerable. Literally there will not be very serious uptake of Vista in that area until MS releases the next version of Windows (or until the time they THINK they're going to release it).

(Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line)...Try running NT 4.0 these days... Won't get you very far. That's the future of Windows XP. They are going to drop it like a hot potato.

And yet, I am currently dealing with a facility that just finished upgrading their offices to Windows XP at about the time Vista was released, and has exactly zero 2003 servers out there--in fact they still run a good portion of them on NT4. They are stuck with them until they are forced to upgrade a lot of equipment on a production line because the application is no longer sold and the vendor is probably no longer in business. Upgrading for many people isn't just a matter of 5 or 10 thousand to upgrade a server...sometimes it involves costs upwards of a quarter million or more....for one server (or one redundant pair).

I've noticed something with every new release of Windows since 2000 was released: the uptake has steadily slowed. When NT4 came out it offered marked improvements over 3.x. Furthermore the market was less established--there were more non-Windows legacy systems being picked off. Then 2000 came out and it was well received, but I'd argue not QUITE as rapidly adopted as NT4--it sold briskly and there were a lot of upgrades but NT4 stuck around WAY more than NT3.x did. Then XP and later Server 2003 came out and there was a very muted response to them--they were readily accepted in new installations but enterprises were extremely slow in upgrading--so much so that 2000 is still very common in the server room.

Now we have Vista and the impending release of a new server OS, and not only is there no enthusiasm to upgrade, there is even resistance to accepting NEW systems with the software. No, things are different now--even though that's what weve always bee saying.

Makes no sense whatsoever..

[dhavleak]

Quoting from TFA:

Ninety percent of 961 IT professionals surveyed said they have concerns about migrating to Vista and more than half said they have no plans to deploy Vista. (emphasis mine)
Quoting the headline of the /. post:

90% of IT Professionals Don't Want Vista (emphasis mine)
Hardly the same thing. Concern != Don't Want. And you have to be crazy not to be concerned when you deploy a new OS in your enterprise.

TFA even cites a Forrester Research article to back up it's claim (without linking to it). If you want the actual link, here it is. That study actually claims that one third of businesses will switch to Vista in 2008, which I think is ridiculously optimistic -- but it just goes to show what these studies are worth.

Then there's this gem:

Stability in general was frequently cited, as well as compatibility with the business software that would need to run on Vista Let's consider compatibility first. Do these 961 IT Professionals think that switching from XP to OS-X or XP to Linux will give them less compatibility headaches than switching from XP to Vista? On reading this, I can't even understand how CmdrTaco decides that this post is worth our time!!

And next, let's consider stability. Stability first of all requires a definition -- it's very unclear what stability the 'study' is referring to. I'll assume for a moment we're talking about Vista not crashing. This is a very valid concern -- any time you're doing an enterprise deployment/upgrade. That's why you test your apps on the hardware you purchase. That's why you standardize on the hardware you have validated -- so you know you are buying machines with h/w, with supported drivers, etc. None of this is new to OS deployments/upgrades in general. I'm not sure what other kinds of stability they might be referring to, but it takes on an all-encompassing vagueness in a very FUDlike manner in TFA. I mean, if you're talking about stability from a support perspective, nothing has changed between now and XP. MS is not about to go belly-up anytime soon, so your vendor is not going to sell you an OS and then dissappear into the ether. Maybe stability refers to the disruption caused by transitioning OSes in the very first place. Understandable. That's why businesses aren't using Vista yet. They don't switch to a new OS just because it was released. They had (or at least should have had) very clear requirements, cost-benefi analysis etc. done when they deployed XP. If they did a good job with that deployment, and it is still serving their needs, they have absolutely no reason to switch. Windows XP will go End of Life in 2014 (i.e. MS will support it until 2014). Until then, if their requirements have not changed in a way that necessitates them to switch, they should not switch -- unless there are some other circumstances (like perhaps needing to deploy new h/w and wanting to sync the OS upgrade with that), or perhaps some cost-benefit analysis shows that they can save money by switching to Vista (just tossing that out as an example -- no need to launch an all-out assault on me).

Re:Vista is MS's fastest product launch ever

[Dunbal]

and easily has exceeded XP's sales at the same point

Of course more computers get sold nowadays, too. Adjusted figures would make more sense.

Microsoft has opened a Pandora's Box.

[Aslan72]

We're in a world where Open Source has created compatability and the goal is brining everyone in under the same roof. Leopard, Ubuntu, SUSE and their ilk have created experiences that are comparable to Windows and, in some cases, even better. The onus is now on MS to keep up. If we're waiting on SP1 for this OS to be stable (which we are) I would have rather they waited a year and released a better product. There was a ars technica article where they interviewed the manager for Vista some time ago and everyone at MS was praising him because he was marshalling people and ditching features in Vista in order to get it out the door. I'm horribly dissapointed in what came out. There were features that I, for one, was looking forward to and would have given Vista's poor security implementation a whole lot more grace in my eyes had they included them. --pete

Comparisons to XP are invalid

[HangingChad]

Just like XP flopped when people were complaining for ages that thousands of applications wouldn't work on it

I was there and this nothing like those days. There is a perfect storm of circumstance conspiring against Vista success. The devaluation of the dollar and crisis in confidence of the valuation of US investment instruments will put many big enterprise upgrades on hold. Based on just the phone calls I get, I see more companies actively seeking alternatives that will run adequately on the commodity hardware they already own.

MSFT contributed to Vista's problems by delivering late, stripping out the value functionality, jacking the prices and confusing the market with their licensing scheme.

Business is good for people writing those decision papers right now.

Only between the keyboard and computer

[Overzeetop]

I don't mind that MS has a new operating system. I mind that MS has decided to change how and where everything used to manage the system has been changed. I mind that their "paradigm shift" to tasks rather than actions prevents me from getting to the parts of the OS I need to manage the system. I run a small company and we're all XP (and a 2k3 SBE). I do the IT because I can't really justify 5-10% of my annual operating budget to an IT consultant. I know where things are, and have a good idea of how to keep things running. Every time I run into a default Vista install, I spend tens of minutes looking for "the old way" of doing things. Now, I wouldn't need to if I were trained in such things - but isn't the point of modern OSes to minimize the amount of technical resources necessary? I still can't set the wireless card to do internet searches and have the wired card only do lookups for ips in the 192.168.0.x space, just like I can't with XP, but now it takes me three times as long to fool the system into doing just that.

Personally, when I hit a key, I want whatever I've just initiated to be done. Now. With several billion operations per second, and only 2 million pixels on the screen, I shouldn't even notice anything has happened, and yet amazingly I find a 1-4 second delay for most operations under vista. I hate to get all old-man on modern IT, but DOS was faster under a 33MHz processor for executing simple operations. Transparency is not particularly valuable if the computer can't keep up with my inputs.

My Reasoning

[Tarlus]

As a sysadmin, I would fall in that 90%.

I'm not so much concerned about incompatibility, instability or user-unfriendliness.

The license would be expensive and I'd have to upgrade 100 machines which are all comfortably running XP. XP works for everybody. Nobody has any applications which require Vista. So there's really no motivation to buy it.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Sadly, once security updates cease, a lot of those people in that 90% will have no choice but to reconsider the switch.

Snicker

[LaughingCoder]

It doesn't matter what 90% of IT professionals want. What matters is what 90% of the users want. The days of IT running the show are long gone. Those days ended when the PC came out.

My 5 Cents Comments

[HerbieStone]

I once designed GUIs as a professional and found it to be a very difficult job. I too hate Explorer with a passion, though now that I work with Ubuntu at home and at work it has become more and more a memory of the past. But I disgress...

Designing GUIs is difficult because you don't really know what it should look like until someone else tries to use it. Every person will use your GUI a bit differently and those will want you to adjust your GUI your GUI accordingly (and often be right at that). And (and this is the most problematic part) even persons who don't use your GUI will still have an oppinion how the GUI should look like and work, according their own logic and might demand that you change it (bosses and such). That is why I have huge respects to the guys over at apple. Oh and I don't get me wrong. I don't search any excuses for MS, after so many years they still manage to screw up on the usability side. I just want to give you another perspective as to why such might crap happens at MS. My guess goes towards bad bosses.

The other thing I wanted to say is, that I think your "DISK1C___GAMES PORN___(E)" is pretty kinky and I bow before you beeing so straight forward and not obfuscating it after taking screenshots of it ;)

Cheers
Herbiestone

Annoyingly different

[56ksucks]

Vista is annoyingly different than XP. They've moved and renamed common windows folders with no reason, they've taken the menus off the windows. And while you can put them back on a) menus have been a fundamental part of the gui interface for like 30 years. People are going to miss them. and b) Grandma isn't going to know how to put them back. On top of this the windows classic theme does not resemble XP, it resembles 9x/2000!!!!! Again, if grandma got her first computer with XP this is going to confuse her. The lack of an XP like theme is bogus.

Also, why is it necessary for a computer to ask my permission 4 freaking times to create a folder? How is that more secure?

I probably didn't like the changes in XP when it first came out. But I've had a few years to get use to them, and they weren't this annoying. I'm in no hurry to upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM and install Vista any time soon in 256 colors because I can't find a video driver. I'll stick to XP for now.