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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"
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Maine upgraded to Office 2k7 as soon as it was available and, even with the ribbon, the help desk managed pretty easily as I understand. (I know a lot of the IT workers, a bunch of the politicians, and even regularly consume alcohol with a few of them. I will be at my DA's house tomorrow night actually as I want to talk about a buddy of mine who's in a spot of trouble.)
This is more about saying that we have "good enough." It is more about saving the money that would be involved in upgrading systems at this time when we're one broke ass state and no one wants to raise taxes. It is more about saving that money from the hardware and additional training as well as the actual labor involved.
Because the State's IT department is so small they often will hire outside contractors (I have done this) to go into a facility and upgrade/swap out and we can't afford that right now.
From my own perspective, the scary thing is that I don't know if we will be in any better a position to afford this two years from now or not. Pardon my language but, as a State, we're fucked. Our tax burden is already quite high, the lack of people driving due to the gas prices killed a lot of businesses this year, and the lack of revenue has meant that a few important things have had to have been skipped to tighten our proverbial belt.
There are a few signs that things aren't too bad but for each of those there are signs that show a much worse case. We had to cancel our paving jobs (not town or city but State jobs from the DOT) because of the costs associated with them. At the same time our banks (actually a lot of credit unions here) are still loaning money and construction hasn't taken that much of a downswing from what I have seen over the past few years. I did spend a bunch of time driving randomly across the nations and seeing things like halted motel construction across the I-10 corridor in Florida doesn't seem to equate what I'm seeing here.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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."
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.
I work for game developer (small by corporate standards, but big for a developer), with about 150 employees. Most of us are running 64-bit Vista. See, the trick is, though, this was part of a round of hardware updates as well. With our machines (quad core, 4 GB RAM, fast video card, etc), the performance impact of Vista is largely negligible.
Most companies are not running games that demand high-end systems. They're running office machines that calculate spreadsheets, write letters, create powerpoint presentations, track inventory, and play the occasional game of solitude or watch youtube videos with office mates. It's hard to justify upgrading to a new operating system with a lot more overhead when your basic computing requirements haven't changed much. In general, I expect that Vista is likely selling at just slightly over the rate of new Windows-based PCs being sold. There are probably more users that upgrade than downgrade, and most new PCs have Vista on them now.
I think this is mostly a case of unrealistic expectations - the idea that an operating system is so compelling that people will rush out to upgrade. I could have told them that most users with would not feel entirely compelled to upgrade their existing hardware. Users seem much more likely to upgrade their operating system at the same time they upgrade their hardware. And frankly, people are finding it harder to justify upgrading their computers when the only thing that a 4 year old computer can't handle is a) the latest, greatest PC games, or 2) the latest, greatest operating system.
The funny thing, if Microsoft had forecast realistic adoption rates of Vista (at just above the purchase rate of new Windows-based PCs), then they probably could have claimed success. But they all drank the kool-aid since it made their forecasts look so much better if large numbers of people suddenly said "Hey, let's give Microsoft a bunch of money to Microsoft for a new operating system, and I'll get a) better security (uh, shouldn't that be freely available as patches?), b) a slower machine (uh... wait a sec), and c) a shiney new desktop - unless your video card can't handle it, or unless you buy the wrong version of the OS." And from a corporate perspective, even if you're already paying for the software, it still doesn't negate the cost of migrating, retraining, and performance-related issues.
And now, rushing a new version of Windows out guarantees a fragmented Windows market of THREE operating systems (which we developers still have to support, even if you don't, thank you). It's not going to encourage adoption rates any more than Vista did. These guys just don't learn.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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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