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83% of Businesses Won't Bother With Windows 7
Olipro writes "Most enterprises stated they won't bother with Windows 7 for at least a year as they simply continue to distrust that compatibility issues won't occur with their mission-critical software ... The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing." I suspect that will change before they actually release the OS.
I don't blame them in the least.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
why upgrade when the current software provides everything you need
...MS hasn't often demonstrated an ability to make major functioning software improvements at the last minute. I suppose we'll see, though.
Mainstream support for XP ended last week. It's dead, Jim.
2003 to 2009 is longer than any version of Ubuntu is supported. It's had a nice life. Shoot it in the head, and move on :-)
First it's 84% of IT pros and now it's 83% of businesses? Might have something to do with these surveys being carried out on a submission basis, where the only people who respond are a minority that are either passionate "must-have-the-latest-version" fanatics or passionate "anything-other-than-XP-sucks" fanatics. The apathetic majority isn't taken into account.
XP will be fased out and I don't see companies using the abandoned version that we call Vista(it's the truth!). Unless they want to get an illegal version or stick to their old licenses if they still have it. XP is old and MS is trying to obsolete it and since they have the monopoly on spreading Windows, companies will have no choice.
We WILL switch to Windows 7 or you will be forced to choose a different OS like Mac OS or a GNU/Linux flavour(or a dying *BSD ;) )
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
No problem! Microsoft can just bundle a lacie external drive with each seat licensed to store and restore users' files! Problem solved! I wonder if Doom will play on Windows 7 ....
Microsoft now has to battle the recession as well as Linux. So now the PHB's finally have an argument they understand -- salaries vs. upgrades.
Most enterprises stated they won't bother with Windows 7 for at least a year as they simply continue to distrust that compatibility issues won't occur with their mission-critical software...
First off, whoever edited that sentence needs to get a clue-by-four -- "distrust that issues won't occur" is just terrible English.
About the content, why would any IT person ever have to resort to "trust" anyone for their software compatibility? You'd almost think they can't grab a VM image of Windows7 and test their software to see if there are compatibility issues.
If I were a CIT and someone came up to me with this dribble, I would tell them to build a testbed and actually report on compatibility issues, possible savings, and so forth. Windows 7 probably won't be worth the money but deciding that before you actual evaluate it is madness.
I've been working in software development for 35 years. No company I've ever worked at jumps on new versions of Windows, they all have a policy of waiting at least until SP1 regardless of whether its an improvement or not.
The only news here is that the figure is that 17% might move straight away. From my own experiences I would have thought nearly all, if not all companies would wait at least a year.
Microsoft has announced the infrastructure for its cloud computing service Azure, formerly (and presently) Windows Vapor.
"We want to be more responsive to your needs," said Sam Ramji of Microsoft during a Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit panel this week as he wiped rotten tomatoes off his suit.
"We want all open source innovation to happen on Windows 7. In practice, Windows is too slow, and just putting Linux underneath the same software stack triples performance. So we're running the Windows versions of the software on Linux using Wine. We'll also be funding the Wine on Windows initiative."
The new Microsoft Amazingly Open And Genuine Public License allows you complete freedom to use, modify and redistribute the software provided that every copy comes with a DVD of Windows Vista Ultimate, you acknowledge that Microsoft's FAT patent protects a remarkable and valuable innovation in computer science and all accompanying documentation is in OOXML. Also, all your data belongs to Microsoft.
The overwhelming dominance of Microsoft was assured, he said, pointing to their success in paying netbook manufacturers to use Windows XP and paying US retailers not to stock the Linux versions of the computers. "We're also enforcing our patent on right-clicking. And on the number seven."
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Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released? Guess what guys: Businesses tend to be conservative by nature, and aren't going to do a massive upgrade without a good plan. For any reasonably large business, it will take several months to certify all of their internal software with any new OS release, not to mention the actual time it takes to execute the switch. They would be saying the same thing if you asked them when they would be switching from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6.
Most enterprises stated they won't bother with Windows 7 for at least a year
Well, seriously, how often do business environments run a brand new version of Windows? I don't work in IT, but I'm going to go with almost never. This doesn't sound very special.
Why would businesses "upgrade" to Windows 7 whenever XP (or dare I say it, Vista) does the job fine. Windows 7 really offers nothing more than XP. Why? Because most businesses have one purpose for an OS, to run applications. MS's applications are usually so crappy that a third-party application has to be installed to do the job. If this third party application runs on XP then thats all they really need. The reason why Vista was so ill received is that the sole purpose of MS's OS (in the business world) didn't work. UAC made half of the applications be run as admin to run correctly, the OS itself was slow and sluggish, the new dialogs seemed change for change sakes rather then any usability improvements (especially for the computer illiterate types you have at the top of businesses that know only how to click the third icon from the left), etc.
There is no need for a business to "upgrade" from XP to Windows 7. No speed/performance increase, no new interesting programs, no gain of any new capabilities when coding programs so no new programs will require Windows 7, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
All the IT departments care about is that their lousy designed software works. Most IT departments in fact are completely incompetent so any statistic that might originate there is meaningless to me. Here's a little quote to illustrate: "You can't install Firefox, only Internet Explorer meets the company standards regarding security" -- Random ignorant IT guy
Our current plans are to test thoroughly with existing apps and infrastructure if released 2009. If that goes smooth and/or fixes are in place by March 2010 we will roll out summer 2010. As all data is stored on file servers we will image all machines with a Windows 7 fresh install based image. We are currently running XP Pro and will be bypassing Vista. Currently our Snow Leopard adoption plans are slated for summer 2010 as well due to a likely June or after release date. We will be going to Ubuntu 8.10 or 9.04 this summer for our Linux boxen.
IF...and that's a big if, I was going to install Windows 7, I would do a clean install on a new disk. I would keep my old XP disk on the shelf, just in case.
If I was in charge of the Microsoft department of recommended practices, I would strongly recommend this method.
I would NEVER, EVER take my one and only XP disk and try to upgrade it, EVER. Upgrades in-place are just way to risky for me.
That being said, I will stick with XP until it is absolutely necessary to switch.
The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing.
The Million Dollar answer is "no". Because when you upgrade a corporate desktop, you don't upgrade in place. You create an image and you reimage your desktops en masse. Anyway, Microsoft will find a way to spur Windows 7 adoption, probably by making Windows XP slower with a required security update again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't see anywhere that says upgrading to Windows 7 is going to require a clean install. The only thing that came close was the article last week where Microsoft said they wanted people to clean install the RC instead of trying to upgrade to the RC from the Windows 7 beta .
Also, don't most people want to do a clean install of a major OS version?
Most companies don't like spending money just for the sake of spending money, they have XP in the enterprise right now, and it works, and it doesnt require machine upgrades either. there is no compelling reason to make the switch.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Often, that clean install makes for a much faster system after years of cruft building up on a system.
Although there may be compatibility issues, MS making a clean install mandatory might be one of the most clever marketing tools they've had in a while. Then again, it could backfire.
Word of mouth from those who migrate and see how fast a clean build of Win7 is vs XP might breathe new life into the Windows brand.
-
woo, I only registered today and got my first submission posted. Anyhoo... I agree with the statistic possibly being a bit of bullshit, though that said, I largely agree that there's very likely still quite a large degree of total apathy towards the newer windows editions. So many companies use crappy legacy apps that are critical to their business despite the fact the software's probably been replaced by something much better... usually the staff need retraining because they're essentially monkeys. Still, withdrawing support tends to give businesses cardiac arrests so "hook or by crook" Microsoft will prevail.
I know I am, I hear it's quite popular with test groups.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Microsoft has abandoned the end Customer and Developers as their main focus. All of their heavy marketing driven initiatives with companies usually resulting in DRM and other unwanted bloat has made their software unappealing.
I've never worked at a company that chose to suffer through upgrading between versions of windows. Clean install with a scripted data migration has been the preferred route. It takes slightly longer, but you end up with less cruft on the system.
It's almost funny. Linux can't beat microsoft. But why bother ?
In the department of "clobbering microsoft" the one organisation that's really doing some damage is microsoft.
Perhaps we just need to wait a few years.
Most PEOPLE stated they won't TRY A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM for A year BECAUSE THEY THINK IT won't WORK with their software...
First, you have to remember that best practice says you never install anything in production before SP1 is released. Second, before you put something into production you have to test it, the bigger the enterprise the more testing you have to do. Third thing is that you have a certain amount of businesses that are small enough to assume that they can't get an enterprise license agreement, or lack the IT staff with enough experience to get one. About the only businesses that will go straight to Windows 7 (insert new OS here) are those small enough that they will actually use the install provided by Dell, HP etc.
I've worked as a consultant with design of large scale deployments (tens of thousands of PC's) across a number of organizations and I can assure you that anyone wanting to deploy the latest OS before SP1 would be considered incompetent and allowed nowhere near a client. The idea that any organization of meaningful size adopting Windows 7 right away exists only in the minds of marketing departments and naive users.
upgrades their OS without having new equipment first. Business will upgrade as they replace their machines. That has always been the way, so this is no surprise. When their XP machines crap out, they will replace them with whatever flavour of windows is available then... OS upgrade is a misnomer, they are generally new to accommodate new tech that becomes available over time since the release of the last OS. That tech is usually hardware-based and the new OS talks to it better. If you don't have it, the old OS will do just fine. Most realize that.
Not news. Either they just upgraded to Vista, and see no need to move again, or they're still on XP, and have seen no need to move so far.
No business that's not Windows-centric (producing products for Windows) runs out and upgrades to the new Windows first thing. You wait, you see what the stupid early adopters have to say. You install a couple of desktops, see how the new os behaves in your environment.
Then, if you like it, you begin a phased roll out. That's the right way to do it. You minimize your problems, and you make fewer bad technology decisions.
Myself, I'll probably buy 7 for home use, and I think 7 is a much more serious effort than Vista (yea, it's just Vista with some of the annoyances pulled out, and a lot of driver issues fixed, so what?). Eventually I'll need to know it, so might as well get some experience on it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The company i work for (part of a large corporation with several tens of thousands of employees) plans to begin changing to 7 in the third quarter of 2010, depending on whether the first sp will be out by then.
Well, actually, they were planning to go ahead with Vista, but the IT guys (me and 2 other persons for the national division of the corporation (that is 5 companies)) advised against.
Going for another OS is alas not an option, a lot of official software (i mean software we need to be complaint with regulations in my country) only come in MS flavour.
The problem isn't dying support for XP, but just licensing issues, MS won't continue our licenses for XP forever, we already had it changed automatically to Vista, and had to ask to downgrade that back to XP.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
Ridicolous. Microsoft could sell MS-branded kicks in the groin for a year, exclusively, and even THAT wouldn't guarantee their "undoing".
Also: since that POS called Windows Vista was released, Microsoft made over 4+ billions net revenues per quarter. Forcing people to do a clean install of Windows 7 will have no bearing on their profits.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Maybe what Microsoft really needs is an XP emulator, like the classic mode in OS X or rosetta for running PPC software on Intel, or an independent implementation of the XP API, like what's in wine. I haven't haven't heard anything about Microsoft designing such a thing though, has anyone else?
I believe it's called "Microsoft Virtual PC". I'd imagine that the big thing stopping Microsoft from bundling a disk image of WinFLP (cut-down Windows XP designed to run on Windows 98SE-class hardware) with Windows 7 is the possibility that it might get distributed separately.
It must be true.
Your network should be designed so that personal files are stored on a file server, not on the local machine. Even if you don't have full roaming profiles set up, you can still mirror their "documents" folder onto a primary fileserver with a backup solution. If all the users files are on the local machine, you must be used to spending a lot of time rebuilding machines already, so what's the problem?
Anyway, who the hell would want to do a dirty install? Upgrades between versions work indifferently at best...Usually it causes some problems, and you always get better results installing clean. It's a moot point though...Who does individual installs on more than a handful of machines? We usually just create a few different images, and push the appropriate ones to the appropriate machines across the network. Instant upgrade.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If you disagree with several Funny moderations, get an account and start metamoderating once you're eligible.
Only idiots and consumers do actual upgrades. Any self-respecting enterprise makes their own images and deploys them, complete with apps.
Going for another OS is alas not an option, a lot of official software (i mean software we need to be complaint with regulations in my country) only come in MS flavour.
You used the Commonwealth spelling "flavour", so you're probably not in the United States. So why has your country chosen to rely on imported proprietary products of Microsoft Corporation, a foreign business? Perhaps "complaint" was an apt typo. Complain to your legislators and all the news media you can.
Please I beg think of the poor chairs that will suffer
1.) REMOVAL OF THE PORT FILTERING GUI FRONT-END CONTROLS in VISTA &/or Windows 7 - Port filtering functions perfectly operating simultaneously alongside software firewalls, & IP Security Policies
(All 3 security "filters" for IP here, run FINE together, even w/ a NAT true stateful packet inspecting "firewalling" router, for example)
They do so in a layered security manner, just like door handle locks (firewall), deadbolt locks (port filters), & chain locks (IP Security policies) do...
(I.E.-> Take 1 of those 3 layers down (which is what many malware seek to do, right away)? The others are STILL IN THE WAY, since they all operate via diff. drivers on DIFF. LEVELS of the IP stack...!)
AND
2.) The issue with HOSTS files involves EFFICIENCY more than security though!
See - in removing (after a 12/2009 Patch Tuesday update) 0 as a valid blocking IP address (vs. the larger & slower 0.0.0.0, & worse still the default 127.0.0.1 loopback adapter address)? MS made a blunder on disk, since the filemass is now larger & WILL be slower to read thru, as well as not being able to 'pack' as many entries into a tinier filespace to read them up from.
Contributing to inefficiency & yes, "bloat", in doing this latter one...
----
Top that off w/:
A.) Built-into-the-OS "DRM"
&
B.) The practical removal of OpenGL gaming
(Oh, on this one? Well - There are supposedly ways to make OpenGL games run though, via the OpenGL icd iirc, but it's a hassle & the games do NOT look like they were intended to be from what I have heard tell, once the 'hack' is put into place)
?
TO Microsoft: YOU CANNOT SELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT... who the hell are your marketers, & what are they thinking??
APK
P.S.=> I am only "SCRATCHING THE SURFACE" of other things folks' objected to in both Windows 7 &/or VISTA (I personally also didn't like the amount of interface change that occurred, dumb really, for a company into "backward compatibility", because it makes people 'relearn' how to do what they've done for more than 14++ yrs. in Windows 9x - current MS OS' based on the Windows-NT branch of them)... apk
We continue to purchase new workstation machines with XP licenses. We will continue to do so as long as they are available. When they aren't available, we'll probably start buying new machines with Windows 7 or 8, but we sure as hell won't be upgrading any existing machines. All of our business software will still run on 98. The only program I own personally that requires Vista is Halo 2.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
There is a difference between what is good for the IT market and what is good for business in general. Us IT crowd want to push the latest new thing, for some this means mark up on s/ware, others it is more consultancy. What a business wants is a stable IT system that does what the business needs in a stable way -- boring, not sexy. Once applications are written they stay written; the will be changed when the business requirements change, not because the computer systems change.
MS is also caught up in the sales/upgrades treadmill - to not do so would badly damage its bottom line. What is in the best interests of MS is not in the best interests of its customers.
Linux is based on 35+ years old Unix, I regularly use programs that are essentially unchanged since I wrote them for System V Unix 25 years ago. How old a system is is not an issue unless you need to make money by flogging your customers new versions. In this regard Unix/Linux is a better platform for companies than MS Windows systems.
I wonder, how many 32-bit OS installations are still around.
Since software gets more and more complex and the amount of data a computer has to deal with keeps rising to, the need for an 64-bis OS will also grow. 32-bit OS'es have reached their limits now, so I suppose almost anyone, who's starting to experience the limiting factor of their 32-bit OS, may want an upgrade to Windows7 as their next step.
I still got a Windows XP 32bit version myself, 4GB RAM in my computer and only 2.5GB usable, so an upgrade to Windows7 is likely to come for me.
I don't see people mentioning the economy but it should be taken into consideration. For many small businesses, asking if they'll upgrade to Windows 7 is the equivalent of asking if they'll buy new computers soon.
In addition, all the upgrade happy people have gotten burned with Vista. I don't find Vista bad, I use it and am happy with most of it except for the bloat. But a lot of people must feel slapped in the face by Microsoft when they paid for Vista and are asked to pay for Vista SP3 aka Windows 7 now so soon after Vista's release.
I do Windows support for work so one of the things I do when a new version is coming out is test various apps and services and find out what works, what doesn't and so on. Sometimes things don't work and you have to find a workaround, or wait for the vendor to update things. There is NO reason to jump right in and cause problems. You wait and test instead, and then when it is ready, start deployment.
Also many systems you don't really want to upgrade. They are too old to run a new OS well. So you leave them with what they have for their lifetime. The OS upgrade happens when new hardware is purchased, though that isn't seen as an 'upgrade' by normal metrics.
So I'm not surprised that businesses aren't jumping on board. Why would they? In our case (a university department, not a business) my desktop will start running Windows 7 when the RC comes out. Maybe one or two other tech people will do likewise. When the release comes out, only new systems will be purchased with it, and depending on what they are doing they might get XP or Vista put on them if there are 7 issues. We won't start offering it as an upgrade for probably 6 months after release, since I'm guessing it'll take that long to make sure everything is thoroughly tested and there's been time for vendors to issue updates. At that point we'll likely move anyone who wants to over, and try and have all new systems running it, but won't make a big deal if people want to stick with XP. We probably won't start pushing it hard for another year or two. It will have to be gone by 2014, of course, because that's when security patches stop.
There's just no sense in rushing in to a new upgrade. That doesn't mean you are opposed to it, just that you want to do it right.
They're waiting to talk with you about the misleading headline, because of the missing "...for at least a year" part. It's like having the following headline "Thousands die in Los Angeles" with the story continuing: "Each year, thousands of people die in Los Angeles. Many die of old age. Some die of heart attacks..." I'm not objecting to stories pointing out foilbles of OS's like Vista or Windows 7, but misleading headlines should be avoided.
That's a good rule - AS A MINIMUM. Considering Server 2008 is running on the VISTA kernel and was released to the public *with SP1*, maybe make SP3 the line instead. My workstations and servers are windows free - how about yours?
I say things which affects my Karma negatively. (and I don't care) For instance; All religion is false.
I believe this is why Microsoft wanted to move to a subscription model (and probably still does). If Microsoft can convince a company with 10,000 newish XP machines to upgrade -- that's 10,000 times the cost of an upgrade license. And any machines not upgradeable will be replaced with new machines and OEM licenses. And home users aren't a small market either as most will need to upgrade or buy new systems to support the software....
With a subscription model, like the one we use at the university, we pay X amount of dollars per year for OS and Office upgrades/installs, whether we buy new systems or not. Mostly it's to upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro. Anyway, if MS could have everyone move to a $30/computer/year model, they'd have a steady stream of cash and wouldn't need to create a new OS.
Though honestly, XP is ready for a refresh -- I'm not sure Windows 7 has enough useful features (the imaging is one though and UAC is not as annoying in 7) to warrant an upgrade. Perhaps as a platform to enable new features such as touch screens or Minority Report holographic interfaces (I swore that was in Windows 7 RC 4.52).
Windows XP has deep roots and is strong. It will not go away easily. Too many people were burned by Vista, and in this economic climate switching to a new and dubious OS just for the sake of keeping up to date does not make sense.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Time machine is awesome. So are the multiple desktop. Leopard is pretty good, although the folders look terrible.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Why would you NOT clean-install Windows 7? You can't even upgrade XP from SP1 to SP2 without a clean install if you want your computer to WORK! Are us windows users REALLY so absolutely opposed to doing things CORRECTLY?! (Obviously, right? If we wanted to do things correctly, we'd be running LINUX!)
btw, one of my three XP boxes reached 4 months of uptime last night. Not that I'm trying, I just don't have need to reboot it. Seems rather impressive, for a non-server version of windows.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Not really surprised, look at how many business jumped on vista, and before vista even took off its diapers, we have windows 7 coming out the door. Most business employees are used to xp, its what they have at home and its what they have at work. What company is going to spend the money necessary to upgrade their OS(not to mention new hardware) AND spend extra money + time retraining all their employees to use the new system? It will eventually start spreading just because xp has stopped being supported, BUT it will be a very slow process, we are talking probably three to five years before it even starts to spread. However, by that time, Microsoft will have ANOTHER OS ready to come out.
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released?
IIRC, the previous story only contained lies and damn lies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At least, mine doesn't.
When we upgraded all of the computers up to XP (95, 98, NT and a couple of 2k systems), it involved the user getting a whole new PC, with a standard image built from scratch with a clean load of the OS and all apps and updates installed fresh. You only need to do the work ONCE. You clone it. Then roll the image onto each new PC.
For my company, we won't be upgrading to Vista or Win7. There simply is ZERO business case to do so at this time, and certainly no budget to afford the PCs required to run Vista or Win7.
Bearded Dragon
I'd just like to briefly point out that XP isn't exactly dead. It just won't see any new features or enhancements such as SP2 or SP3.
However, Microsoft has committed to extended support (critical security patches) until 4/8/2014. That gives it a 12+ year shelf life.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223
-David
Really. When I RTFS (I know, I'm new here), my only reaction was "well, duh". Business not immediately switching to the newest and shiniest newfangled thing has absolutely nothing to do with "mistrust". It's called prudence.
Heck, most "businesses" where I do support only moved to XP a few years ago. That's easily six, seven years after initial release. Why would it be any different now?
Business as usual. Wake me up when said businesses declare that they will install Fedora 11 on the day of its release.
I can see why. Vista sucks. It is the operating system of the mentally deficient. I now have XP installed (I have to have at least one Win machine for work) and refuse to even try Win 7 due to a complete lack of trust with Redmond. It is their own doing and when you stir up a hornets nest, you get stung.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
If not even Microsoft can stop the Windows XP monster, what hope does Linux have?
Maintenance costs? As if desktop apps have no maintenance costs. Do you know how easy it is to have just ONE piece of software to worry about? Any patch, any change, any data is centeral. Right there for you to control, not distributed accross dozens or hundreds or even thousands of machines.
Sure, really big apps like photoshop,they are hard to reproduce but simple stuff like email programs? Check the complexity of adminning outlook in your organsiation vs web-email. Hell, if you got outlook you are going to need a webapp anyway if someone is allowed to use a non-windows OS.
If you app is client-server based then the web is a logical place to put it. Yes it is harder to program for but so what? Coders ain't all that more expensive then windows admins but coders actually finish their task sometimes. Windows adminning just seems to grow and grow until you have a larger IT then production department.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
First of all, I honestly haven't used Vista enough to form any meaningful opinion on it whatsoever. My experience is limiting to trying it on on demo machines at FutureShop and BestBuy.
Having said that, I have to use XP every day at work, and I find it to be an ancient OS, almost 8 years old. The UI is cluttered and inefficient compared to OS X, and I find myself yearning for something with better task management. The Windows 7 taskbar, as well as the better security, would be a welcome fix, not to mention a version of IE higher than 6.
I believe the fact that most businesses are still using XP is less an indictment of Microsoft as it is the complacency and risk-aversion of most companies. There seems to be a fear of change and new technology, even when the efficiency gains are real. My project is still on Java 1.4, even though it's no longer supported by Sun, and there are no plans to upgrade.
This space left intentionally blank.
Oh yes they are different. And when you are "remote controlling" stuff over the phone, these differences are huge.
The last I checked, the "start menu" is rather different. Even the shutdown menu option is different. XP shutdown is Click the button on the bottom left called "Start", select "Turn Off Computer...", click on "Turn Off/Restart" etc, vista is "click the four coloured button on bottom left, click on the "triangle pointing right" select "Shut Down" (or Restart). Apparently the "power icon" by default does not cause Vista to shutdown, instead it causes it to Sleep.
There are also extremely big differences in lots of things that the normal users don't normally use but often need "tech support" for e.g. network configuration (maybe someone messed with their config over the weekend, so they call you and you have to fix it over the phone).
BTW WiFi network configuration is a mess too - Intel, Dell, Random Vendor, Windows, all have different ways of doing WiFi config... Very annoying.
Going to 98 to 2000 was a change, but you did get significant benefits from it (no longer have that "GDI resources" problem and other stupid flakiness - try pressing winkey on boot just as the windows 98 GUI is starting up ).
i for one am disappointed in MS for releasing Vista and 7 so close together... I'm a windows fan... simply because its convenient... but i will not pay for windows 7... i like XP and i like vista (despite most incompatibility issues)i think maybe vista should have been more of a home OS because there's all sorts of training costs so employees will be able to USE vista after they got so used to XP. despite my faith in MS i believe windows 7 will be somewhat of a flop... also in a time like now nobody is willing to spend extra money... what a bad time to release an OS... (even if its supposed to be less of a resource hog than vista)
sorry but KingSatan@jsp.org > all
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released?
Your point being that Vista was a rousing success?
The real issue is money. There's no real business case for upgrading business PCs. Really, any machine built in the last ten years has enough CPU power to run most business applications. Even big spreadsheets. At most, a RAM upgrade might be useful. Face it, Windows 7 is a minor improvement over Windows XP. The last major upgrade was from Windows 9x to Windows 2000, a decade ago. Most business apps run just fine on Windows 2000, which still has significant usage in the business community. (You run Windows 2000; it's not a slave to Redmond's remote updates like XP and later. Some businesses like that.)
We're in a major recession. Business activity is down. Nobody is expanding, adding employees or customers at a high rate. So where's the need for more compute power?
A real upgrade would be a transition to an all 64-bit world, or IPv6 by default, or an OS with security good enough that "zombies" never happened. But Microsoft isn't delivering anything like that. Windows 7 is a yawner. It doesn't even have many of the features originally promised for Vista, like the relational file system. So why upgrade?
Since WinCE (who came up with that?) is DOA, XP is Microsoft's only 'strategy' for netbooks. Don't seem them killing it for a while...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
*whoooooooosh*
An xp upgrade to Windows 7 is not a true clean install.
In fact, it keeps all your files.
Programs that are self-contained (ie no registry items or old or proprietary libraries) will probably still work.
You're making a bigger deal over this than it really is
One could also say, " don't know how most businesses are run, but around these parts, XP works, and works well." followed by, "we don't need the features of Linux [or Mac OS X or insert your favorite OS here])". This is part of the problem with getting alternative OS adoption.
The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing.
Seriously, how many businesses upgrade Windows installations over an existing previous installed version of Windows? Businesses don't do in-place upgrades of OS's, they re-image the entire machine.
It's faster, more reliable, and gives you a much higher degree of certainty of both what is on the machine and that it's going to work. Upgrading over an existing Windows installation is messy at the best of times, with mess generally being proportional to how many revisions behind the OS you are upgrading to. In the case of 7, that's one major revision and one minor revision. A huge amount changed in Vista between XP, and 7 only widens the gap.
I can only conclude the poster has no idea about how OS upgrades are performed in businesses of any reasonable size. Because only small businesses would even consider an OS upgrade over an existing install if they give a damn about reliability. The time spent ironing out the issues post upgrade will often be less than the time it takes to just reinstall from scratch.
For the uninitiated, perhaps someone should explain. These statistics are absolutely meaningless because they do not akgnowlege at all how large corps with sophistacted intranets update their software. Step 1: Exploratory research. Studies are requested, reviewed, or conducted to determine increase in productivity/cost reductions/other benefits of upgrading. At the same time, increase/decrease in costs is considered. Finally the actual investment cost of switching enters ethe mix. A final number is compile. If gain from benefits significantly greater the loss from detriments, we move on to round 2. Step 2: the test environment. So managment said OK, lets update. The entire corp will not see the results of this decision for anywhere from weeks to months, depending on size of the organization. Test environments are set up with the new software and mission critical jobs are performed in the test environment for, you guessed it, testing. Lets assume that no major flaws are discovered and workarounds/solutions are implemented for those issues that do arise. Moving on. Step 3: partial rollout. Some machines in the intranet get the software upgrade. Commence another test phase. Assuming that regular employees can continue to do regular work, after even more weeks or months, the rollout finally reaches the entire intranet. As you can see, much money is spent even BEFORE the software leaves the test labs. Why would ANY corp even consider cutting edge software at release when they know for a fact, there will be zero day flaws, as happens with any sophisticated software designed by anyone, anywhere, ever. This isn't the biggest issue however. Its the fact that these bugs will be getting fixes, which would require further intranet testing before those FIXES are pushed to employees machines. Not to mention introductory prices are always far too high. It only makes sense to A) wait for bug fixes to be worked out and to come down in quantity/period of time and B) wait for introductory prices to deflate. Doing this VASTly reduces costs, and any successful corporation will always be cost conscious. So, as was said in the first few posts, this is not news by any definition of the word, the statistics quotes are completely irrelevant and altered to make it seem anti-MS. Mission acomplished I suppose. We aren't buying it. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
I thought all businesses waited until at least SP1 before they considered upgrading? That would put it at least a year after windows 7 is released anyways.
But I'm also one of the ones who realizes the *benefits* of Windows 7 as well.
First, it runs faster than XP. On similar machines using the 7000 public build, we boot faster, shut down faster, load apps faster and make better use of the standard PC we have. That means less resources wasted.
Second, standard imaging formats (WIM). I can create an image and 'inject' drivers into the images without having to redo the image at ALL. Our images change quite a bit, so we spend many full time employee hours on this task as we change our configs. It would be a huge saving there in time alone.
Better policy management -- this speaks for itself. While we have everything configured to run with scripts, the administration nightmare would be greatly lessened if we could instead rely on the "Policies and Preferences" that now ship standard with Group Policy.
That's just a handful though. We will be waiting a while to ensure compatibility (and that just takes time) and besides, MS support is a necessity at our company (17k users worldwide) so we can't be running desktops that are out of support. There are a lot of benefits to Windows 7 and while I know this is Slashdot and I should be wary of the *nix fans, some businesses have a significant investment into MS technologies and make a lot of money with them. We're one of them, and we run smooth, and if I can follow the next upgrade path for Windows and save lots of cash and time in the meanwhile, then I look like a winner all the way around.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Businesses are cautious, but they're even more cautious during an economic downturn. If Windows XP is working for a small business, and that business is struggling (or even just has the threat of future struggles hanging over their head), the business is going to keep costs down by any means. Paying money to upgrade their OS just because the new version is out is a logical place to start. Especially if an OS upgrade could break things and/or require staff training. I would think that the economic downturn is equaling less sales for Microsoft for Vista and less pre-orders for Windows 7.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
See subject-line, & What's THAT have to do w/ -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1197039&cid=27556999
?
APK
"...and today on C-SPAN we bring you the Senate Banking Committee hearings on Microsoft's request for TARP funds after the disappointing launch of the latest version of its Windows operating system..."
Wouldn't that be a sight to see? lol
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
I can understand this because I have a mission critical app that the vendor has already stated will not have an upgrade to Vista/Win7 until XP is 6months from EOL. That's at least another 4 years away as XP has now entered the final 5years of Extended Support and based upon my vendors statement, that means at least Win8 before any upgrades are available to a mission critical application.
The main question is do I like it, which gets a resounding HELL NO!! I don't like it but I don't have any choice as it's the only certified application in my field.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
There are a lot of threads about corporate users not upgrading until SP1 is out - an agreed good thing.
However - and please correct me if I'm wrong - I believe that Windows 7 is the name of the great big fix to Vista and that furthermore, the name was changed from Vista to Windows 7 to avoid the bad taste, as "proven" by Mojave.
Now, if I have my history and nomenclature correct, Win7 is really some flavor of VistaX and if so named would have by-passed the SP1 adoption rule. The catch is that the Vista name was sullied by bad performance (or defects, whatever).
So, the real problem in my opinion isn't that Win7 is new - it's that it's the waited-for corrected Vista, but because of their own shenanigans, they can't win: the Vista name is poison, a "brand new" Win7.
FWIW, they could just take a page from Apple's playbook when their time comes: scrap their OS, use some *nix variant as a core - say.... Linux? - and then layer their own GUI on top of it. This was a highly successful strategy resulting in a market-acceptable product for Apple, and I am being NEITHER a fanboy nor catcalling when I suggest surprise that MS is NOT copying this approach yet.
(Just to save us all some time - I'm well-documented hereabouts as being a supporter and critic of both MS and Apple, so props in advance for not putting me in some narrow category when reading this post or replying to it. A few days ago, I praised MS, today I'm dising them.)
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Personally I love Windows 7 - I installed the Beta, and I'm finding it extremely stable - finding the drivers for my bits and bobs (especially Wireless dongle) was a pain, a bit like with Linux only easier, apart from that - it just works. I have it installed on a tiny drive with very little room for anything else - my kids use nothing else - despite there being no software, they do their homework using Wordpad, and surf the web, and that's all they need. I'll be updating all my 3 machines as soon as I can (having avoided Vista like the plague for some years now) My main reason is that I've seen that it's OK, and I'm ready for a change. The thing that might stop me is the price - any clues yet ? At work though my ICT people will as a matter of policy, only consider adopting a new OS when it gets to Service Pack 2 - they say that it's just not stable enough before then. I have a new works laptop on order which will be a downgraded Vista to XP machine as well. This - must do a clean install stuff is a red herring I think - they mean don't install over a beta version which is a bit different.
Microsoft should cease Windows Xp support and start hiring Programmers to create Xp only Malware that should speed thing up.
What a bogus headline... you purposely left off the "for a year". Duh, I've only been doing IT since DOS 1.0, and there has NEVER been an operating system upgrade that businesses have embraced in less than a year... maybe two.
Yes yes Ubuntu, here we gooooo!
Here be signatures
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Selling Linux is a bit easier, as there are no licensing costs, and you can deploy it piecemeal without retraining employees. Compare that with the disruption of people going to Win7 and probably also upgrading office - you have 1-2 years of weird incompatible file formats and interop between two versions of outlook.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The company I work for gives it's employees the choice to choose which OS they want on thier machines. If you want MAC, they give you a MAC, Windows?, you get a Windows box with your OS of choice.
As for linux, they let you install the *nix flavour you like on your own.
That's how bussiness models should be.
I bought Windows 95 that promised stability, security etc etc.. MS still hasn't delivered on that promise. XP didn't deliver either.. Why exactly would I spend money to "upgrade" to something that MS says will deliver on the promise made for Windows 95. /shrug. XP works fine in my vbox. And when the malware gets to be too much I just dump the vbox and start new. My base O/S (Solaris 10) seems to have no issue with stability, security etc.
While new is nice and some of the features in windows 7 are really spiffy. Looking at my organization I ask myself this question. Why upgrade, why spend the money. Everyone says "ohh well security" bla.
I won't disagree that security is important, as an admin, I do understand the importance and liability concerns. However, properly implimented windows XP is secure for all but the most sensitive of computer systems for internal security, and if we are talking external security...frankly while its not quite a moot point, with modern IDS, Firewall, and proper networking structure, unless your running a bank, or have a HUGE amounts of sensitive customer data (Wallmart anyone) there is just no call for a more secure desktop OS. Fact of the matter is, a properly utilized domain structure can eliminate security concerns like Ipod slurping, data dvd dumps, USB keys, floppies, hell if you want you can even lock down what programs they can execute and restrict the users ability to do ANYTHING other than run the 4 or 5 pieces of software they need.
Besides which, if as a company your worried about your employees getting ad-ware and misusing the internet, lock that down, I mean common, we can restrict internet access to specific websites with little to no difficulty and there is really no call for letting our users run rampant and cause us more headaches. When a new employee comes to me and says "I can't check my myspace" I glare at them and point at the copy of the internet use policy hanging on my wall.
As for windows 7, and vista. I do NOT like vista. I DO like Win7, win7 has all of the bling of vista without forcing me to upgrade my hardware to run a base install. Win7 is smooth, streamlined and MUCH better than XP in many regards. Its easy to install, easy to use, and has many spiffy and much needed improvements. Don't get me wrong, there are huge issues with the BETA I'm testing, however its a good step in the right direction. But the question I ask as an admin is "is the cost worth the benefit" and so far, the answer is quite simply no.
Cypher (i'm to lazy to log in)
"Economic concerns and worries about compatibility -- the bugbear that doomed Vista in the corporate market -- will keep Windows 7 on the shelf for all but a handful of enterprises until at least 12 months"
IANADM, but I thought Bugbears were easy prey (only a few hit dice)?
Agreed, 110%, on this statement of yours &, it IS a shame imo:
"In the department of "clobbering microsoft" the one organisation that's really doing some damage is microsoft. - by OeLeWaPpErKe (412765) on Monday April 13, @10:51AM (#27556601) Homepage
So, why would I say that/how so?
Well... ok:
----
1.) THE REMOVAL OF THE PORT FILTERING GUI FRONT-END CONTROLS in VISTA &/or Windows 7, for one thing - Port filtering functions perfectly operating simultaneously alongside software firewalls, & IP Security Policies
(All 3 security "filters" for IP here, run FINE together, even w/ a NAT true stateful packet inspecting "firewalling" router, for example)
They do so in a layered security manner, just like door handle locks (firewall), deadbolt locks (port filters), & chain locks (IP Security policies) do...
(I.E.-> Take 1 of those 3 layers down (which is what many malware seek to do, right away)? The others are STILL IN THE WAY, since they all operate via diff. drivers on DIFF. LEVELS of the IP stack...!)
AND, FOR ANOTHER?
2.) The issue with HOSTS files involves EFFICIENCY more than security though!
See - in removing (after the 12/2009 Patch Tuesday update) 0 as a valid blocking IP address (vs. the larger & slower 0.0.0.0, & worse still the default 127.0.0.1 loopback adapter address)? MS made a blunder on disk, & made things less efficient in HOSTS files, since the filemass is now larger & WILL be slower to read thru, as well as not being able to 'pack' as many entries into a tinier filespace to read them up from.
(Contributing to inefficiency & yes, "bloat", in doing this latter one...)
----
Top that off w/:
----
A.) Built-into-the-OS "DRM"
&
B.) The practical removal of OpenGL gaming
(Oh, on this one? Well - There are supposedly ways to make OpenGL games run though, via the OpenGL icd iirc, but it's a hassle & the games do NOT look like they were intended to be from what I have heard tell, once the 'hack' is put into place)
----
?
TO Microsoft: YOU CANNOT SELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT... who the hell are your marketers, & what are they thinking??
APK
P.S.=> AND, I am only "SCRATCHING THE SURFACE" of other things folks' objected to in both Windows 7 &/or VISTA...
(I personally also didn't like the amount of interface change that occurred, dumb really, for a company into "backward compatibility", because it makes people 'relearn' how to do what they've done for more than 14++ yrs. in Windows 9x - current MS OS' based on the Windows-NT branch of them)... apk
You do need to retrain employees, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Let's not mention the issues with retraining people for OpenOffice and the occasional "No I won't open and display your file correctly" issues with OO.o
Lying doesn't make Linux more of an option.
Since when do enterprises do a normal Windows install?
Pretty much every company I know uses images.
I doubt the lack of direct-from-XP upgrade is any concern to any enterprise.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
no retraining for switching to linux? lulz...
Get thee to a nunnery quick old man
This is nothing new. Most businesses want to ensure a significant number of early adopter bugs are ironed out. The others typically are on a upgrade cycle which requires them to upgrade at the start/end of the cycle. The large company I'm working for is on a three year cycle, and they are just rolling out Vista now, which means three years till windows 7. A story trying to make news out of nothing.
"compatibility issues"..translation:
our software is a security fucking nightmare, and to run it on Vista or Windows 7 would annoy the shit out of the user if we didn't disable UAC...
In other words what's the point? might as well continue to run it on XP on an admin account.
One of the companies that I consult has about 3400 desktops running XP is actively in the process of 2 things:
This I find very interesting because this place has been, from their very inception, an "all windows all the time" shop. One day while talking about things with the owner (privately held) I ask him why, given that he was one of the windows faithful? His reply was surprising in as much as he seemed like a religious person who had simply lost his faith.
I think this points to MS weakness of keeping the faithful in the pew as it were. In my mind MS has produced only two really useful bits of software, windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP ( after the eye candy and entertainment bits were removed ) but even then only after several years after they hit the streets.
The future of MS is not in cranking out new and fresh releases of their basic product for entertainment value ( as they are currently doing ) but being more like linux and releasing incremental versions as newer hardware becomes available. I think the delivery schedule needs to be stretched significantly so that these new incremental releases can be tested and vetted before they hit the streets or corporate america for that matter,
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Why does MS need an XP emulator? I think you may be confused about Vista. It does not have a new API. You still program it using the same APIs are XP. Binaries are totally cross compatible. Things don't have a Vista binary and an XP binary.
So why are there compatibility problems? Well a few reasons:
1) Kernel mode stuff. The kernel levels stuff, including some driver interfaces, did change. So anything in that arena had to be redone, sometimes to a large extent. An XP driver wouldn't work straight out on Vista. Thus you got hardware that wasn't supported right away. Also, other programs that muck around in the kernel like firewalls and such needed redesigns.
2) Increased security. MS upped the security in Vista in various ways. Some of those broke programs that weren't coded well. Probably 90% of those things could be fixed by just running the program as administrator, or turning UAC off. However some ran in to other security features, like the fact that system services can't directly interact with the desktop anymore.
3) Some really old, like way pre XP, compatibility things that were taken out. One example, that applies to 64-bit only as far as I know, is modifying the ISR table. This was never something you should do, however programs did it back in the 95 days so MS left in the ability to do it. They finally shut that down with 64-bit Vista.
However, you discover that straight user mode programs that are coded how they ought to be have no compatibility problems. I've tested hundreds of apps from a bunch of different areas, engineering, sound production, video editing, gaming, system tools, etc and most of them worked straight off in Vista. Of those that didn't, it was often a very minor fix that was needed to make them work, like giving them write access to their program folder.
So there is no need for an XP API emulator. XP software works fine. Windows 7 is the same situation. Many people have joked that Windows 7 is actually Vista SP2, and that's not far off the mark. There are some new things, but it really isn't a major OS upgrade.
That's the hobbyist perspective. From the enterprise perspective, Linux is definitely not free-as-in-beer, because they're looking at things like RHEL, not Ubuntu.
Sorry, I'm talking about server side, which is the common place you find linux. If you do it right, users have no idea that the utility websites and the fileserver are now running RHEL5.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Dunno about everyone else, but I regularly use Windows 7 beta, OSX 10.5 and Kubuntu with KDE4 and XP is starting to feel a little long in the tooth vs all of the above.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Is the primary revenue stream for the first few months of a new release actually from business? I would think it was from the perennially hopeful rank-and-file, the gamers thinking they need the latest version of DirectX, the shiny-object people, or pre-loaded on consumer PCs purchased in that time frame -- you know, all the usual early adopters. Business tends not to be early adopters unless what they have now is intolerable, and maybe not even then.
I don't see where this is even news. Is the author trying to make the case that Microsoft is in trouble because business is generally going to wait until SP1? For this to be true, they'd have to *already* be in trouble, and I don't think that's the case. This is trying to create a story out of nothing.
My company just last week switched from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Now we're 2 years behind instead of 6.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Honestly, anyone who has been using Windows XP for the past 3-5 years shouldnt even be thinking about trying to do an upgrade install to Windows 7 or Vista for that matter. The article points out that a major reason people wont switch is because they cant do an upgrade to the new OS and will have to install from scratch. This is a GOOD thing. Anyone who has had the pain of dealing with Windows upgrade installs knows that the longer the original install has been around the more chances you are going to screw something up by upgrading. I am curious to see how Windows 7 fares, but I wont be upgrading to it. Vista has atleast had most of its issues around stability addressed, and for the majority of businesses, it is something they already have licensing for and have probably just been downgrading to XP using the OEM downgrade rights. I think most will probably go to Vista instead of buy new licensing for Windows 7. I personally have been using Vista Business x64 for about a year now on my gaming PC and it is more rock solid than XPx64 was and has less driver issues. It still hates my Creative X-Fi but thats the only issue I have had. XPx32 works great for business however and is still my companies primary OS on a wide range of PCs. When push comes to shove, we will be upgrading to Vista Business since I have had a solid year to test it firsthand with all of our internal applications on my work laptop and home PC. The reason people wont move to Windows 7 is because its not mature enough, and is based on a platform that had lots of issues with its original architecture that had to be corrected later. Everyone SHOULD be skeptical of Windows 7 right now, and I hope that no one does go out and migrate to it right away. Businesses and home users alike should always opt for something more mature, because in the end, both of them want the least possible headaches.
"It's mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality."
There are no licensing costs. There are support costs, which is a different thing. RHEL support seems to vary from $350-$1000/yr, depending on support levels. Not sure how that scales by server.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
...big surprise.
The thing is, software does not really get old. Windows XP SP2 works as well today as it did when SP2 was first released, and there if it is working for businesses, then those businesses would be well advised to just stick with what works. A lot of Windows installations are on systems that are only used to run a few specific software applications, and not for composing documents or interacting with files on the hard drive.
I guess the real problem is that Microsoft keeps trying to make one-size-fits-all operating systems, when the market seems to be diverging a bit. A lot of businesses really do not need most of the features in Vista or Win7, or in OS X or KDE4, and would rather be able to just hang on to a more bare-metal OS that runs the applications they need and nothing else. This is perhaps a growing window of opportunity for Linux, since it is trivial to strip out "advanced" features of a Linux distro and get a plain vanilla desktop; if Wine becomes capable enough to run these business critical applications, we might start to see migration away from Windows, unless Microsoft extends XP support or creates a special "Windows 7 Bare Metal edition" (Windows BM?). Of course, that is assuming that those businesses are even planning a migration. There are still places where DOS is being used for critical applications...
Palm trees and 8
I've seen this kind of attitude more and more: organizations terrified to change anything, where even the tiniest tweak starts to require a bureaucracy of change control. Years can go by without significant improvement, until eventually a change seems unavoidable and turns into a complicated, expensive and near-catastrophic upgrade. Ridiculously, in these same organizations, "improvements" as silly as discovering some feature in Outlook are heralded as being amazing productivity boosts.
As time goes by, the I.T. people necessary to successfully pull off transitions from A to B grow frustrated and leave, which only makes organizations less likely to ever successfully make that jump.
Is this fear of change because managers are coming from industries that have moved more slowly than technology? I'm not sure.
But this is one of the reasons I hate Microsoft...their software has set the entire industry -- and maybe several industries -- back by at least a decade. Microsoft delivers junk, and in turn Windows software companies seem to just copy Microsoft's bad examples. Entire groups are essentially now trained to believe that computers must be ugly, awkward, and unstable pieces of junk that require entire legions of I.T. people to keep running properly. They see no problem going for coffee while their machine churns away doing what should be trivial tasks. They are trained to believe that software must be really expensive, and that if it isn't hundreds of dollars and supported by an army, it is somehow a "risk" to use and isn't as "good" as what they've been using. It is truly sad that so many groups around the world will probably be completely screwed into using older versions of Windows for years.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Ok, come on now everybody has to drink the cool aid at the same time.
Why bother
[citation needed]
I know Microsoft said that Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 Final requires a clean install (or rollback to a previous version), but that's the only upgrade I saw them comment on. Care to cite a source for the quote above?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It will help, as vista helped, make people stop and take a look around for an alternative out of necessity.
For everyone claiming that Linux is not ready for the desktop, we now have what is shaping up to be two major MS versions (not counting the 30 or so flavors) that are not ready for anything.
As Linux use to suffer from and still does to some extent, everyone will complain their hardware is not supported. The coolest OS in the world is not very cool if nothing will run on it or with it. Linux has made great progress in solving that problem and it will only get better at it.
Living in Chile
*pop*. Your document failed to print. The specific error message was 'lp0 on fire!'. Click here for help troubleshooting your printing problem.
Let's start with the blurb posted here. It's very deliberately misrepresented with the title "83% of Businesses Won't Bother With Windows 7" when the rest of the sentence is actually "83% of Businesses Won't Bother With Windows 7 for at least a year". There's a huge difference between saying that 83% of companies won't use Windows 7 versus 87% will wait a bit before upgrading.
The second point worth making is that Windows 7 isn't expected to ship until the end of this year, 8 months away, at the soonest. So it is reasonable to expect that most companies will not be upgrading a year from now, as they won't have even had time to properly test the OS.
How many of your employees did you teach to use Microsoft stuff before they stepped in to the office? I'm guessing that number is near on zero. If someone writes "computer literate" on their resume, then I assume they mean they have at least the most perfunctory understanding of "File -> Save" - if they can grasp that, then the operating system really doesn't matter these days. If they can't, they are not computer literate and get the boot. Anyone that whines, and yes, lots of people do when confronted with change, you say suck it up, you want your pay check, teach yourself how to learn the same trivially easy stuff in a slightly (probably better) rearranged menu structure. Your "Excel" icon is now called "Calc", it's right there on the desktop too, if you don't know what something is, click on it and do some of that learning thing. It's not hard.
Yup, I understand some people actually do need a proprietary operating system and software layout, they get what they need to do the job. If anyone can figure out better, faster, and cheaper ways to do the same job, they get promoted.
We switched from 2000 to XP when we bought new PCs. Or when a employee quit and we re-setup the box for the next one.
I never ever saw an update from one OS to the next one. Always clean installs from pre-setup install files.
The same will happen with XP -> 7. So once the end of life for the PCs is reached and we get new ones and all the software works. Then 7 will be installed.
There is no way, corporations will rush out and buy win 7 licenses just to upgrade from XP to 7. Never ever.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Now that is just plain silly. A good operating system should be as near to invisible as possible. You shouldn't have to touch it, configure it, male it safe, patch it, fix it or anything else. It should simply be the bridge between the applications you want to use and the hardware, absolutely nothing more.
So the reality is refine it and refine it and refine it, don't dump it, don't get in the users face, don't make the users jump through hoops and don't continually try to force upgrade costs and retraining issues.
This decade has been a debacle for windows users, rather than continuing to develop win2kpro that pursued upgrade profits regardless of the costs forced upon customers, each cent of profit for M$ is becoming $1 of cost for the customer and customers are realising this and balking at the imposition. The reality is, that it is M$'s customer abusive business practices that is forcing a switch over to Linux in order to get away from a supplier who simply can not be trusted.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Time machine is awesome. So are the multiple desktop.
How about "The new APIs are important to maintaining compatibility and speed, as each new Mac OS X improves performance."
Time machine is flashy and all, but when discussing the merits of OS upgrades on Slashdot, "it looks pretty" doesn't aid in the Battle Of Everyone Else Thinking Mac Users Are Pussies.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Is this really bad news for Microsoft?
If it was, they would have done something about it before this news came out, wouldn't they? After all, one can only think they learned something from Vista not to mention decades in the OS business.
So I can only think this is exactly what Microsoft wants. How can people not buying be so good?
To begin with, a lot of people are going to IMBY (in my back yard). Let the "neighbor" businesses have the pains of upgrading. That's just SOP (standard operating procedure), though, so Microsoft just shrugs, just the cost of doing business in the OS world. No biggie.
Then right away, instead of 83%, it's more like 83 minus 50 or 83 minus 60 percent that gives any cause for concern. If Windows 7 gets a good reputation from the early birds, purchases will go up.
So finally, there's always the same old problem that is facing manufacturers everywhere: make it too good and no one will buy an upgrade. By the time Windows 7 seeps into computers Windows 8 is just around the corner. Is XP good enough? fast enough? Sure it is. It just proves that Microsoft has the ability to make a winner. If Windows 7 is a winner, Windows 8 and 9 may be the ultimate losers - so Windows 7 has to serve as a marketing engine for Windows 8. Very complex, but one can only bet that Windows 8 and maybe 9 is under development right now.
One can foresee that Windows 7 ought to sell fairly well anyways - there is a lot of hunger for change. There are many new hardware features coming, and Windows 7 will just make life better for new computers.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
And how do you do the "piecemeal" replacement for Outlook with an Exchange Server? With employees using the calendar & shared contact features of Exchange it's going to be pretty hard to have some employees on Exchange and others on "an almost as good" platform. There really isn't a good alternative to Exchange/Outlook in the corporate (>250 employee) environment.
How do you deal with existing files that "don't look right", "don't open" or "format funny" in OO? How about the Excel (or Word) macros that do useful things? How about the backup strategies, single sign-on for corporate applications, authentication, and adminstration
And of course there is the whole system lock down and administration issue.
Going from XP -> Vista or MS7 is much easier than switching OS's--especially because you can retain all your existing software (Office 2003 runs fine on both Vista & MS7), Exchange and almost all the training translates.
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released?
It might be. I didn't buy Vista either.
Your point being what, exactly?
Screwed us over royally. Our shop bought 6 brand new dual-core, all SATA Dells last year with XP licenses and 17" flastscreen monitors and after our IT dept. "set them up" we had old Gateway 17" fishbowl monitors and Windows 2000.
I had to tag this one "Misleading Headline"; there's a big difference between "83% of businesses not bothering with Windows 7" and "83% of businesses not bothering with Windows 7 for at least a year, due to compatibility concerns.
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
And you're just a clueless fool that has nothing better left but the use of profanity.
The "this is a New Operating System so you must re-install and hope your systems work" strategy for market thrashing has out lived it's usefulness. This was fine for hobby computers, and it continued to work in business due to the ignorance of the people holding the reins. Well the people holding the reins have either begun to catch on to the shell game or have been replaced by people that understand it. The real world needs continuity now new flash and tweeter.
No. They won't go to 7 for the same reason they didn't go to Vista. They don't need to. With XP, they have a product that works "perfectly" so why spend money to upgrade. I have asked the question before...
Q: What is the problem with Vista (and now 7)?
A: XP
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
It should be standard practice for organizations of all types and sizes to wait before moving to a new operating system or "upgrading" to a new version. Anyone that jumped on the later versions Windows NT, 95, 98, Me, 2000, and even XP just for the heck of staying current is dumb. If you have mission critical applications you just don't do it. Where I work, we were testing Windows Vista on just a few systems. One of our software developers is using an entirely Vista setup and everything seems to be working well. Many of our custom/in-house applications are or are going to be web apps and the mission critical software that I administer now will move entirely to a web based portal so in the future I won't have too many concerns about application compatibility because theoretically our software will be able to run on any operating system's web browser. The truth of the matter is that Windows 7 has the potential to work well. I honestly think Vista got a bad hand due to small amounts (but apparent) of bad publicity that got blown way out of proportion. I use Vista as a home OS everyday and honestly, it works better than my fully updated Windows XP and my Mac OS 10.5! As it has been for years; casual users and people that don't know very much, have found it "cool" to jump on the bandwagon that is already over capacity, in saying that "Vista sucks" or "Windows is the biggest virus ever made." Then they turn around and call XP the greatest thing since the computer was invented, but if you rewind several years, they were also bad mouthing the earlier releases of XP as being big, slow, and dumb and Windows 2000 "couldn't play" any of their games; although I had no trouble. Get over it, operating systems of all types have problems. Windows is no exception and the fact that it has to tolerate a lot of hardware, software, and different types of users (including those that know little) it is not as good as it can be upon every single release.
Having suffered under the Windows burden for more years than I truly care to remember, the pattern becomes recognizable that once the patches (numerous, bothersome, pick your own descriptor) have been applied over the course of years and the platform is quasi-stable, MS brings out a new platform, with great appearance, lacking the "security" developed forht eold one over the course of years. Do these new OS upgrades really get released. do they escape, or do they just get dribbled on the floor and seep out the door?
"Well, i fully agree with your points about opengl/hosts/ipfiltering on current windows versions..." - by Bert64 (520050) on Tuesday April 14, @04:46PM (#27576845) Homepage
Excellent, & I am glad to see you have sense (because I know you're skilled enough in this art & science in the material we're discussing (compliment to you by the by))...
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"In terms of VM, yes theo is right, more complexity introduces scope for bugs... Back to VM tho, theo is very right that added complexity goes against the principles of security" - by Bert64 (520050) on Tuesday April 14, @04:46PM (#27576845) Homepage
I am glad you concede this (the OS itself, under "emulation", is more susceptible, due to possible security vulnerabilities of the OS it is riding on... that's where I was leading w/ the "more moving parts = more room for possible failure" type thinking... which is where T. DeRaadt was doing also iirc!
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"It's not a security test, its a compliance test, it tests wether your system complies with their setup guide" - by Bert64 (520050) on Tuesday April 14, @04:46PM (#27576845) Homepage
Yes, one however, based on "industry best practices", which largely MATCH most of say, NIST's guide for security for Windows NT-based OS...
(&, those practices actually DO work, as you know, for security on the OS' tested upon for said recommendations)...
On CIS Tool?
Well, I call it a "benchmark of security", because running it is VERY akin to running PC Performance Benchmarks in a way, & more FUN to work w/ & know (once you work w/ them) the tools for it also... performance tweakers? They'd LOVE this thing... imo @ least.
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". If you compare the complexity of windows to linux or any other unix system then windows will come out massively more complex (i believe someone posted some nice syscall flow diagrams for serving web pages a while ago)." - by Bert64 (520050) on Tuesday April 14, @04:46PM (#27576845) Homepage
Yes, I have it saved here (lol, severe "nerd trivia" person here @ times)... &, there is a STRONG and GOOD reason for it, or a large portion of it:
A hallmark strength/feature of Windows, in BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY for DOS, Windows, 16-32 bit apps (heck, even POSIX + Os/2 apps (1.3 pm stuff iirc, or is it only character mode/tty type app here only? Never was sure of it, never used it (I used Os/2 2.1-Warp 3.x only)))
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"As they say, Keep It Simple, Stupid" - by Bert64 (520050) on Tuesday April 14, @04:46PM (#27576845) Homepage
Oh, GENERALLY? I totally agree, however, NOT though IF it adversely impacts functionality... & losing "backward compatibility" for older software's NOT worth doing so, & that's a strength Windows has...
APK
P.S.=> Decent discussion, & good to see we did not "butt heads" severely here, lol, THIS time... apk
Minor correction, of myself & a point I made here -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1197039&cid=27581635
In THIS statement:
"I am glad you concede this (the OS itself, under "emulation", is more susceptible, due to possible security vulnerabilities of the OS it is riding on... that's where I was leading w/ the "more moving parts = more room for possible failure" type thinking... which is where T. DeRaadt was doing also iirc!" - by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14, @10:42PM (#27581635)
?
REPLACE THE BOLDED "OS" ABOVE, WITH "VM" INSTEAD...
APK
I don't "do" a 'newsletter'... sorry!
APK
Well that seems logical. If it aint broke, don't fix it. If they need newer feature, they can choose products which offer them.
If people consider the cost/benefit from switching, surely that's better than believing in the inevitability of a Windows upgrade.