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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.
Conclusive proof that Vista has flopped :) Unless the survey was rigged, but CmdrTaco wouldn't be that naive would he?...
want windows at all?
90% of fish like it better in the water than out.
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.
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.
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
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...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
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.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
Please, don't mod down, just don't mod up if you don't like re-posts? How's that for a deal.
Vista's flaw isn't it's lack of a service pack it's the complete lack of THOUGHT in the design of the operating system.
The user interface is quite simply, messy - it's appalling, frustrating, confusing and slow.
Re-post below, sorry but damnit if it's not on topic and fitting (mind the language, I was pissed off when I wrote it)
(I wonder if Microsoft chumps read this site, I can post this all I want but how do I get these darn issues addressed, where do I post this to tell these idiots to wake the hell up?)
Anyhow, here goes..
First off, this post and my subsequent replies, my "general whinge with the OS"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=304745&cid=20695969 [slashdot.org]
Then in a little bit more detail
(crosspost of a post I made on a forum not more than 24 hours ago, I finally documented precisely why Vista Explorer shits me to tears)
Warning: Bad language ahead.
Why does Windows Vista insist on a startup sound, despite me disabling all sounds, they are turned off but it does one at startup, I like quiet and what if I don't want to wake people up?
I've been meaning to make this post for a while, I may have railed on Vista for performance problems, specifically in Crysis, you do need to give a new operating system a 'pass' for a while, let it settle in (it's nearly been a year though!!!)
My beef still sits with Windows Explorer, something I use daily, a lot at work and home, I need it clean, simple and easy to get data into my face as quick as possible so I can react as quickly as possible (yes, I sorry to big note but I am, *that* quick on the keyboard and when working with files)
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh01.jpg [shackspace.com]
Apply to all folders won't let me save the options for "Computer" (My Computer) or Desktop, this is annoying.
also, fuck the breadcrumbs bar, in the ASSSSS
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh02.jpg [shackspace.com]
That motherfucker 'task pane' which is taking space up from my damn explorer view.
Sure, I found some website suggesting I shrink the size of it (yay) but I can still accidentally click the bastard, plus it still looks messy.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh03.jpg [shackspace.com]
Mofo! I accidentally clicked it, see explanation of why it eats babies in the JPG itself.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy01.jpg [shackspace.com]
Those little box pluses, I like them, why take them away? It's confusing and slowing down the amount of data I can take in per 'scene' I need info and you're witholding it, just so you can pretend you're neater than you actually are.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy02.jpg [shackspace.com]
Ahh my boxes are back, this is good, also more cluttered shit.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf01.jpg [shackspace.com]
You call this a save as dialogue box?
I hit shift tab twice (yes, I do often, try it people) to navigate quickly to where I normally would on XP.
I slap backspace like 10 times fast, this should ensure I'm at desktop, almost instantly (shift tab x2 and backspace x10 takes me 1 second)
Does it work? no, of course it doesn't you breadcrumb whores.
soooo I hit browse
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf02.jpg [shackspace.com] oh oh
Hot jesus, make the fucking hurting stop!
This is one of the best reasons WHY I can't deal, look at it
Any good IT professional lives by the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' adagium, so what's new?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
44% are considering moving to another operating system. That's so broad as to be almost useless. "Considering" could mean:
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If you read my journal, you'll see that my latest post is an expansion of my sig. You see, Microsoft's motto used to be "Where do you want to go today?" If that were still the case today, I think it would be a multiple choice question, and the choices would be:
The ironic thing is that all of these alternative OSes are UNIX-based or UNIX-like.
Back to my sig and journal, I haven't used Windows on my own computers for a number of years now, but I do administer a number of XP machines for my employer. This is soon to change as we are seriously considering a move to the Mac platform for all of this company's computers, and for the two must-have Windows-only applications that we use on only two of our machines, we will install VMware and run XP in a virtual machine. We have been testing this configuration for a number of months now and it is rock solid. Not only that, but these two apps are major engineering applications with four and five digit price tags, and although the versions we use are 7 years old, they do the job we need them to do and no upgrade is necessary, so it will be unnecessary for us to switch to Vista any time soon.
We did evaluate Vista when it first came out. The evaluation was a short one because we immediately recognized that MS made a big blunder with Vista. To begin with, the installer took forever to load, and then gleefully told us, in shiny letters on a colorful background, how Windows Vista saves you time, as if to say that if the Installer works this slowly, wait 'till you see the operating system! Once the system was up and running, it became quite apparent that it was a joke. We realized that if we were to embrace Vista, it would mean replacing all of our computers, training most of the employees who use them due to the interface's heavy changes, and have many issues with speed, compatibility, and integration. In short, the cost would be horrendous, and at the end of the day, we couldn't find any justification for this expense, even if we tried.
That is the bottom line. Tremendous cost; no benefit. This is Microsoft's blunder. They simply can't keep forcing upgrades because XP does everything that most businesses need from an operating system, and the course MS should have taken is one of incremental improvements. Had they spent the last five years fixing bugs, cleaning up code, optimizing the bottlenecks of the system, tightening up security, and providing new features slowly and incrementally, they would probably have Windows XP with instant search and a database file system working by now. The only additional misfeature that Vista provides is its incredibly ugly, slow, and resource hogging interface, and we want no part of that. In fact, we run all our XP machines without the Luna interface because we think that's ugly as well.
And yet, Vista is Microsoft's fastest product launch ever, and easily has exceeded XP's sales at the same point:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20070517/ai_n19115496
And MS reported a 27% surge in revenue on strong Vista sales:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2207551,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000610
It's really only on Slashdot that it's a failure.
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.
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.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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).
DO NOT WANT !
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
...I would give the Wine Project (http://www.winehq.org/) all the money they need. Then we could say, "Debian GNU/Linux: Runs Windows applications better than Windows does". My philanthropic contribution to mankind would be better than Bill Gates', because people wouldn't have to die in hospital any more just because the flaky hospital computer crashed again.
"Yet heterogeneous systems management could be a barrier to going with a provider other than Microsoft, the survey found. Respondents reported that challenges include the need to manage multiple operating systems (49%) and the need to learn a different set of management tools (50%)."
Right... exactly the same set of challenges faced by anyone trying to manage more than one version of Windows.
I've always thought that a good measure of the quality of a software ecosystem is its ability to tolerate version skew between components that would be reasonably expected to be forward-compatible. Conversely, if an ecosystem only works smoothly when everything is at exactly the right version and patch level... particularly when the right version is not the latest version, it's an indication of a combination of poor engineering and poor management.
It was a revelation to me when, circa 1991, I heard software developers in a Fortune 500 company use the word "port" to describe what they needed to do to transition software from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1.
This sort of situation is tolerated by Microsoft and other large dominant companies (including Apple, these days, within its own fiefdom of dominance) and by their customers, up to a point.
To some degree it's a win-win scenario. A homogenous environment reduces everyone's support costs, provides a smoother user experience, and allows sloppy engineering to go tolerated and unpunished. It's zero-sum with regard to the cost of keeping the whole company updated, though: that costs the customer and mostly benefits the vendor. Still, a big customer will tolerate that cost, because there's some benefit, in terms of smoother operation. True, better engineering would allow heterogenous versions to interoperate smoothly, so in theory one could have the benefit without the cost, but this is the real world, and many customers may not like the upgrade treadmill but nevertheless see as being the best option.
But there's a breaking point, and it comes if it is not really practical for the customer to go to a homogeneous system.
Clearly it's not practical for a big company to go with homogenous Windows Vista yet.
Microsoft had better have come up with something truly commendable in Vista SP1.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
Windows XP/2000 didn't flop because the alternative was much worse (ie. Windows ME).
Anything was better than trying to make ME work. NT4 wasn't really an option because of missing USB drivers, etc. (Microsoft was deliberately using things like lack of USB to help force the upgrade from NT4 to XP).
These days the alternative to Vista (ie. sticking with XP) is a better option, and Microsoft has nothing to leverage (DirectX 10 isn't going to force anybody to upgrade...)
No sig today...
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.
But then buying Apple products is the same except it starts with a new house and works it's way back to the dress, car, and kitchen appliances which can only come from the same company that built the house.
I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.
The only free choice comes when you use commodity hardware with a Linux or Free/Open/Net BSD OS. Having a geek staff to build and maintain these are no more expensive than buying into the 'Who you gonna sue when it goes bad' thinking so it has to be corporate buys only. When is the last time anyone sued Microsoft successfully for causing millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity due to security flaws and buggy productivity tools?
Too lazy to create a sig...
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
Perhaps in your specific instance it might make sense to let some of the staff switch over to Linux. But wholesale firing of half the company so that you can avoid emulating Linux seems a little unrealistic. I look forward to you presenting your well thought out plan to management and seeing how far they go with it. I also think your description of your support staff as a group of people that have let their skill set "elapse" because they focus on Windows technologies as odd. Your company has to hire its support staff from the same pool of labor that every other company in the US does. There aren't a whole lot of people running around with Linux certifications and with years of experience supporting it in a company. Things like that take years to happen at this point.
The last school I worked at, we got a free volume license for XP or Vista Business (we could use either at any time and chop/change whenever we wanted without having to do anything - the school's licenses worked out that way), we had Vista Business media sent to us as part of our usual arrangements, we were Windows-only, we were revamping the network and basically would have started things from scratch (other problems got in the way but we were planning to take down and re-do the network from scratch over the summer).
We chose XP. It didn't even take a second's thought - we all just mutually agreed Vista wouldn't be worth the effort. We did do a small viability test to see what we'd been given for free and put it on a high-end machine etc. to test it. We couldn't find a single compelling reason to use it over XP and yet we found lots of reasons against - starting with "we don't know what it'll do, whether it'll run everything we need or what problems it will cause us - even after testing it" and going through to "it slows the machines down".
There was literally nothing. We had a network running only a handful of servers, transition would have been effortless because this was before we'd started imaging the machines for the next term and we just all agreed not to. T'aint broke, don't fix it. XP t'aint broke - and the parts that ARE broke weren't fixed in Vista. SP3 is around the corner. SP2 is good enough for our purposes. Vista didn't solve any problems that we had but would have introduced whole new problems that we wouldn't have had - starting with user-retraining - even in Classic settings, it works differently.
Our servers were mainly managed by batch scripts (yes, not even VB scripts) and a common piece of school computer management software. We didn't even bother to look up if they would work with Vista - the OS just didn't even get that far in our estimations. Plus, on the "non-kids" part of the school, we had just plain AD and logon script management. We could easily do Vista on one side, XP on another as they are physically seperate and don't need to be compatible. We didn't bother.
Where were the advantages? Any established network already has stuff in place which makes that all the stuff that Vista touts as features useless - they are all either permanently turned off or people use a better non-Microsoft replacment. For example, we turned all our XP machines to "classic" settings because it meant that we could keep another two "generations" (i.e. a full annual/termly purchase) of computers running at the same settings as the rest of the network at a reasonable pace. Without "classic" we would have had to upgrade or scrap two generations of machines because they wouldn't have been usable. With Vista, we were looking at moving on an extra two generations of PC's minimum - it was too expensive, even in "classic" mode. And to run it "as intended", we were looking closer to four generations.
There wasn't anything new to manage. Vista behaved the same under the management of a Server 2003 server as XP did. It was, to all intents and purposes, a heavier XP. There wasn't anything for the users, especially not after you bring it in line with XP-era performance. Maybe they could have used a handful of features at home but in a business you didn't want half of what it was trying to do.
Maybe if they'd released the next Windows Server at the same time - so that they worked and could be purchased, spec'ced, learned, managed and upgraded in tandem - it would be more of an enticement. As it is it's just a slow XP. With less drivers. And more nuisances.
When people that get Vista licenses literally FOR FREE with the way they purchase licenses and months later they still haven't done more than "curiosity" testing and still don't use your product, you have a problem. We don't get any expressions of surprise or attempts to push Vista when we order PC's in bulk and categorically specify "XP Pro pre-installed, drivers & licenses please, no Vista" on the
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.
Quoting the headline of the
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).
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
I'm the lead on testing Vista at my base for the Air Force. I have to say that I would not give my advice to procede with a full deployment. However, my voice is meaningless as the Air Force has pretty much already decided to go ahead with it and seems to be doing this as a let's-see-what-breaks-and-mitigate. The sad issue is that MS contractors are hired on to key places. We are essentially paying them to sell us their products. I have literally been told by one of these people that something was not a bug but a feature. It's prettier but what does it offer my people? Our testing has fortunately prompted two people I talked to this weekend to buy Apples for their home use.
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Our organization changed from XP to Ubuntu when we were thinking about Vista. Free update, free software, free developing tools etc. Also our customers now get free OS with our products. No need to buy expensive Windows licenses for every workstation that only runs our software.
It's just so great!!!
Here's a good one. I work for It an my Uni and MS sent us a corporate version. It refuses to talk with their authentication server and locks itself down after 2 weeks. Our student labs already have Vista just because we need to use what most people are going to be use to, with all new computers shipping with it.
No, XP threw up a whole host of compatibility issues, just as Vista is doing now. Vista will appear on more and more desktops as time goes on, just as XP did. The software vendors will have to update their sloppy code to work on Vista, and eventually we'll be were we were with XP when it was the de facto desktop OS.
And, btw, Vista does not have a huge learning curve - I picked it up in an afternoon, and I'm still searching for a reason to go back to XP. You can even make it run practically identical to XP by configuring a few options (if the computer is on an active directory, that can be done automatically).
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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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
I came across a few PC vs. Mac ads bashing Vista's low adoption rate and people were downgrading to WinXP. I guess Vista complainers is no longer geek-only, but rather mainstream now since Apple's advertising it?
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.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"