If Windows 7 Fails, Citrix (Not Linux) Wins

Julie188 writes "Microsoft blogger Mitchell Ashley, who has been using Windows 7 full-time, predicts that Windows 7 will fail to lure XP users away from their beloved, aging operating system — after all, Windows 7 is little more than what Vista should have been, when it shipped two years ago. But eventually old PCs must be replaced and then we'll see corporations, desperate to get out of the expense of managing Windows machines, get wise. Instead of buying new Windows 7 PCs, they could deliver virtualized XP desktops to a worker's own PC and/or mobile device. Ashley believes that Citrix's Project Independence has the right idea."

Comments

Because Citrix on Linux slows you down

[Benanov]

In my experience Citrix has some serious out-of-band issues with modifier keys on Linux and Mac OS X. Shift key events don't send correctly.

I type so fast that I mean "Citrix" and I get "cItrix"

I've tested this on Ubuntu 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10, and my friends report issues on Mac OS X.

Re:Windows 7 or 8 or whatever will not fail

[pla]

People will leave XP for whatever the next MS milestone is.

That'd mean "Vista", which people resisted as well as they knew how.

For some people it means just not upgrading their machines, for some it means taking advantage of the Vista-to-XP downgrade licensing, for some it means just pirating XP to install on their new machines.

But no, Vista nicely demonstrated that people will not put up with whatever MS throws at them, as long as what they already have works well enough for their needs.

Re:Citrix.. the insanely expensive?

[afidel]

You're doing it wrong, we support ~30 users per server and they are mostly 4 core boxes with 4GB of ram, not exactly beefy servers by today's standards. We'd easily be doing 4x that if we could go to x64 with 16GB per box but IE has this bad habit of loading the 64bit executable even when you explicitly launch it from the x86 directory causing all 32bit plugins and ActiveX controls to not work.

XP users *should* move to Windows 7

[SpryGuy]

For all the way people are clinging to XP like Linus to his blanket, it really isn't a very good modern OS. It's very, very insecure.

I've been using Vista for almost two years now, and for all the hype about how bad it is, it's pretty damn solid. After getting used to the new UI, it's pretty usable (and this is without the new very nice usability enhancements in Windows 7). I have plenty of CPU and Memory so performance isn't an issue for me with Vista. And the biggest thing? I've been running it, attached to the internet, for two years without having an anti-virus program installed, and NO ISSUES. I don't think I could do that with XP for even a single day.

The fact is, Vista, and Windows 7 to come, are simply easier to use, and far FAR more secure. Hardly perfect, of course, but then neither is any other OS out there (and much of their "security" tends to be "security through obscurity", given they don't have critical mass to make writing viruses and worms "worth-while"). But XP to me now feels a lot like IE6... a flawed, insecure, somewhat crappy solution that everyone should just get over and move on from.

Having used Vista for a while, I can say I find going back to XP really annoying. Lack of the start-menu search is huge, for one thing. The "Luna" UI is ugly and distracting (just as I thought it was when trying to move to it from Windows 2000).

Basically, I think the resistence to Vista is over-hyped, and not based on any current reality (it's more based on the huge "Vista-Ready" snafu of Microsoft and Intel, where upgrading existing hardware resulted in really crappy performance, along with the GA release of Vista not having nearly the driver and application compatibility necessary... Vista SP1 pretty much resolves those issues). And since Windows 7 is receiving rave reviews, and doesn't have the major problems that affected the initial perception of Vista, I don't think there will be a serious issue of people NOT upgrading to it.... or getting it on a new PC and wanting to "down-grade" to XP.

Vista was a necessary and painful step for Microsoft to go through. The fundamental underlying changes they made were painful to users, but necessary for security. Windows 7 refines a lot of them to be less painful (UAC), while "time" has smoothed out the other pain points (updated drivers and applications).

I really don't think there will be any huge resistence to adopting Windows 7 when it's released.

Re:2009 is the year of ...

[Kjella]

I'm living the Citrix desktop right now at a client. First there's a thin client that basicly connects you to the windows logon and internal systems. From there I can access most things, but in order to connect to the Internet it launches *drumroll* another Citrix client inside the first. It actually works quite well, but ironically to this story I'm getting a thick client on monday because there's some things I need to do that it can't. Most people use it though and with beefy enough servers I don't notice much difference, even when I was cropping some screenshots.