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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.
Recently we told RIAA to go pound sand in their ass.
THAT'S all it took to get rid of them? Man, all that wasted money on lawyers, shoulda just bought some sand.
Microsoft may still be getting the same amount of money from Maine, but "They don't want to install Vista even though they already paid for it" is the sort of PR that'll keep others from buying it.
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.
You Mainers won't be so smug when you find out that Windows Mojave is really Vista!!!