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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.