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

[Barny]

Cons: memory usage...

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

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

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

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

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.

In Other News

[RendonWI]

90% of fish like it better in the water than out.

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.

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?

MS blunder

[rice_burners_suck]

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:

• Mac OS X (Server or traditional version)
• Linux (pick your favorite distro)
• *BSD (pick your favorite distro)
• Other UNIX system.

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.

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:Yes, but what does "considering" mean?

[porcupine8]

The article breaks it down a little bit more:

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

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

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).