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Maine To Skip Vista, Go Directly To Windows 7
Preedit writes "The State of Maine is the latest organization to skip Windows Vista, which has been a near-disaster for Microsoft. An internal state document (dated September 15) uncovered by Infoweek reveals that Maine will not be upgrading its more than 11,000 personal computing devices from XP to Vista — ever. Instead, it's going to wait until Windows 7 ships in 2010 and hope for the best. The news is in line with a survey that shows only 4% of businesses in the UK have upgraded to Vista, the story notes. So much for that $300 million Seinfeld campaign." A commenter on the article makes the point that Maine's signing an enterprise software license with Microsoft means that Redmond doesn't really lose out on this deal; it simply allows the state to upgrade its equipment and software on its own time.
Maine has been pretty interesting in the tech field lately. Recently we told RIAA to go pound sand in their ass. Now the State is making a choice to make the best choices (as they see) concerning their upgrade cycle.
This won't actually harm Microsoft in any way but it will save Maine some money in that they won't need to work on re-training people for Vista while they wait for the upgrade to Windows 7.
As the State is currently using Windows XP (and some old Win2k servers still) they should be able to continue some level of support for the remainder of this period assuming that there aren't any major delays with Windows 7. It will be interesting to see what happens.
As a side note, I just was up and across the mountain tops in the Height of the Land checking out the foliage. Once the Sun came out it was pretty vibrant. We cheated and cut across through Byron to Weld and then took 142 back down into Phillips getting out of the tourist areas. It was a nice trip, if you're in Maine and want to see the foliage than today might have been your best shot for this area.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Wait- Microsoft can't get people to install their flagship product, even though they've already paid for it, and the commenter's point is that this isn't bad for Microsoft?
Hilarious.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Wrong State. Maine isn't pro-anything really. We do have some Linux servers but the office workers use Windows, Office, etc... Maine isn't pro-FOSS so don't bother trying to come here with that sort of message, thanks. We're doing this to save money on training and looking ahead to Windows 7. Vista has its bugs. We're saving money by not re-training and skipping an upgrade. We're not saving the money because of skipping the OS, we're saving it by not having to re-train people for a interim OS and not having to invest in more help desk at a time when we're so strapped for cash that we have to actually avoid paving roads because of the increase in the price of asphalt.
You might want to pick another area of the country for that. Many of the politicians and IT staffers are actually decent friends of mine. While you may have some moral reason to want a State to use a FOSS solution the reality is that we're comfortable with what we have and haven't any reason to change at this time. The point is that they do not want to re-train at this time, they don't want to invest in the newer hardware (though DOJ recently got some new hardware along with DOC) that was downgraded to Windows XP Professional instead of the Vista Business that came on it originally.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I do think its great that states are turning down the pointless upgrade and saving some money, but they make it sound like there was no other choice. Seriously is Windows really the only OS out there? If Windows is posing such a problem that you cant even upgrade it cause its so bad why not upgrade AWAY from Windows... I just dont get it.
Microsoft has truly lost its tracks during last 5 years.
Most of their new operating systems have been home-customer-directed teletubby-like interfaces for home-users.
Yet, 90% of Microsoft customers are corporate. Corporate customers don't care about aero or some fancy gui transparency.
Corporate customers want OS that looks and performs like windows 2000, is as secure as XP and doesn't cause excess load on their IT departments.
Vista and Office 2007 both failed miserabely with these requirements.
Office 2007 is being adopted since openoffice isn't ready just yet, but vista can be skipped since XP is good enough for 90% purposes.
Next 5 years, we'll see microsoft plummetting and losing its track even more, while linux and apple keeps gaining it's lost market share.
Once they realize they've truly lost it and try to regain monopoly, they come up with some system which is advanced enough to fulfill needs of customers for next 5 years.
Sadly, vista nor windows 7 will be that system and we corporate windows sysadmins are screw'd.
F* you microsoft for destroying my liver, since alcohol seems to be the only proper way to deal with your shit on daily basis.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
We went from NT to XP, skipping 2000, and we're gonna go from XP to 7, skipping Vista.
Servers have also done the same jump, from NT to 2003 and from 2003 to Win 7 Server edition.
We do make money out of it, though, unlike Maine.
Here's a hint: If you look at Spock, you might notice he doesn't have a beard.
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Can you name a single reputable source that stated that Windows 7 will be based on a "completely new codebase"?
Every single source I've read, internal and external to Microsoft, has explicitly stated it is based on the Vista codebase and is a minor revision of the OS. In fact, there will be no fundamental changes to the low-level OS internals, kernel inclusive, to the point that they are aiming for Vista drivers to work just fine on Windows 7, which should alleviate the driver migration woes that plauged Vista.
I think you should get better news sources.
We're already spending it for support. This isn't your average single user license, it is a giant license. It is more cost effective (I forget the name of the program that we're using) to have this than it is to get just out of band support for a variety of licenses. It includes the ability to upgrade at any time. Contrary to popular opinion we've looked at (non-Microsoft funded) the evidence and it would appear to cost more to migrate to a different OS at this time with the support contracts, the effort involved, and the additional toll on the help desk. I'm not seeing any public documentation showing the reasoning but (and I *am* a fan of Linux in many areas) hopefully you can find something if you look hard enough.
We, as a State, do use some CentOS but at the time we were looking at RHEL and Fedora desktops. Driver issues was one of the things that abounded as the existing hardware wasn't supported entirely. As some of the departments are using older Citrix based thin clients from Wyse there were additional concerns though I don't actually recall what those concerns were.
It isn't that it couldn't be done, it is that it was cost-prohibitive to do so. It isn't that it wasn't looked at, it was, it was that it was considered more economical and a wiser choice to remain with their current choice of operating systems. Though some of the servers did migrate to CentOS and, I believe, RHEL in the case of some of the mail servers.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Oh, a little over 10 years ago.
I work for a Very Large Telecom. Nobody is running Vista. It would be too expensive in hardware, training and support. We can do our jobs just fine with XP on cheaper hardware.
Like most, we are 100% Microsoft on the desktop and there are no alternative we can switch to quickly. Exchange and AD are too entrenched. I have a feeling CTO's at some companies see this risk and are evaluating "other options." The problem is the propriety enterprise packages are tried and true on Windows, and it's too expensive to replace all that infrastructure.
Microsoft might force consumers to buy Vista, but I doubt it'll happen for large companies. It would make a lot of people very angry and force large companies to pressure the Enterprise software vendors to write Mac or Linux clients.
It wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft force their hand, but it could be their undoing if they did.
In Maine the cycle has been a lot like you describe.
94 386/486 mix with 3.1 and 95 in the middle (this was an odd one)
-- Same era -- DEC stuff still and our start of a love affair with Cisco as I recall
98 (year) to 98 (and then to 98se.)
2002 Win2k and XP
-- Same era -- Cisco prices for support kicked our ass
-- Same era -- Wyse and Citrix moved *back* in
2006 XP/Server 2k3
-- Same era -- Juniper shows up with a beautiful price (I think we run Juniper gear almost entirely in some areas now)
Here's where Microsoft screwed up... XP/2k3 is Good Enough® and for us that is a Good Thing©.
If we can still support XP we're fine until 2012 for the most part. Windows XP lasted too long. This isn't costing Microsoft any money, we're paying the same regardless. Licenses, support, and even custom hot patches are covered. We can upgrade when we want.
Our history says, 2010 and we're some staunch bastards here. We'll change when we're good and effin' ready, ayuh! We're too broke to actually afford new hardware. In the middle of these 4 year periods we've ALWAYS upgraded hardware for some departments. So, in 2008, we upgraded some. DOJ and DOC got some new hardware but it runs XP. DHHS (used to be DHS) also gets some very couple of years as they're a forward facing department.
It is my opinion that we're doing fine and that we made the right choice for this. I do believe that FOSS has a place (which is to answer the people saying that this is time to look at Vista) but that's more expensive in the short term for us. Right now we aren't able to afford a damned thing. We are one broke-ass state and the taxation is already a bit too high for some people.
There are old people in this state who are actually going to FREEZE to death this year. It will likely be under a handful of people. But we don't have the money, we aren't going to raise taxes if we can help it because that probably won't help a whole lot unless we tax the rich and we don't have a lot of those, so we can't afford a lot. The lack of income from the depreciated tourism industry is going to hurt us this winter. Oddly our gasoline is just $3.35/gallon at my local store but has still been to high to allow people to chance to come here and spend their hard earned money on our tourism and there aren't many other things left in Maine that people pay for other than lobster.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Window Vista is such a huge disaster for Microsoft, considering that since it's release, it has consistently sold more than Windows XP in the same timeframe since it's release (ie. amount of sales after 1 year of being on the market for both XP and Vista, after 2 years, etc etc). Truly a horrible mistake one would never want to repeat. Oh wait, nevermind.
Let me get this straight...
1) Maine doesn't like Vista.
2) Maine can't know much about Windows 7 because it doesn't exist yet.
3) ?????
4) Maine decides it will switch to Windows 7.
5) Profit! (for Microsoft)
So, step 3 may entail:
a) Someone getting a bribe.
b) Someone realizing how happy Microsoft products have made them in the past, and assuming the Vista problems must have been a one-time fluke.
c) Someone thinking that "operating system" means "Windows".
Hah. They did remove a bit of legacy cruft, at least 16 bit compatibility in 64 bit editions. But the problem with that is that the main reason companies/people/organizations use Windows is that it's familiar to them and compatible with all their stuff, so making it not backwards compatible would be stupid. I think they are slowly weeding out useless stuff but it's not like everything will suddenly disappear, because you never know what archaic stuff people are running on their machines. For example, I believe some antiviruses used undocumented kernel hooks or something like that, and Vista disabled those because they are a security risk and the antivirus authors got pissed because it broke their stuff, which shouldn't have been doing stuff like that in the first place.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Everyone I work with uses it. Oh wait I forgot - I work at Microsoft.
State government is a *prime* candidate for thin client computing. They need to spend some time in Largo, FL so they can see this kind of technology in action. Desktop computing is a waste of money in any environment, but in a taxpayer-funded environment it's just obscene. It wasn't all that long ago that most states had a mainframe or two running the state government, and there were just terminals all over the state. Support was easy and the technology was reliable. Most of those terminals never had a single site visit from the time they were first deployed until the time they were replaced with the first PC in a long line of treadmill upgrades.
State governments need to return to those days, and the technology is available, and it works. *That* would be a true benefit to taxpayers.
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This story strikes me as a bit strange. Maine announces they won't be migrating to Vista, supposedly because it's bad. So far, so good. But then they announce that they _will_ be migrating to Windows 7, which isn't out yet. So there is the possibility that Windows 7 will be even worse (for whatever value matters to Maine) than Vista, but they will migrate to it anyway?
I think what they should have done is compare existing software. If they gain by migrating now, they migrate now, to whatever provides the best result. If they don't gain by migrating now, they don't migrate. Maybe they will migrate to Windows 7 once it's out, but that's a consideration to make once it's actually out.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You've just summed up the Slashdot experience about as well as I've ever heard.
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