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Most Companies Won't Deploy Windows 7 — Survey
angry tapir writes "Nearly six in 10 companies have no current plans to deploy Windows 7 by the end of next year, according to a new survey. Of 1,100 IT administrators who responded to the survey, 59.3 percent said they didn't have a plan to deploy Windows 7. (Full results, PDF.)"
It's got to be tough. You can't kill off XP like you want to, because people really really might leave. But it looks foolish to support that morass of code in spite of the NEW morass you've spent all that money on.
In the long run, they'll switch. Until everything becomes a webapp, the ecosystem almost demands it. Here's hoping people realize webapps are where it's at, for most things.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
We still have IE6 installed by default at work. The reason we haven't upgraded is because it'd break some of the applications and they don't want the headache of having to retest the application (that's the excuse anyway), so we're stuck with it.
I expect we won't be moving to Windows 7 any time soon either, XP works fine and not only would they have to spend money on the upgrade, but they'd have to re-train everyone.
Summation 2
The interesting figure here isn't the 6/10. It's the 4/10. I'd have to question the sanity of that 40%.
This is not a bash at MS. It is just prudent IT policy, and good business not to use untested software in mission critical environments. No new OS, from anyone, is guaranteed to be mission critical in its first year of release.
Most business do not upgrade entire systems often. There's plenty that have only switched to XP from 200 in the past 5 years.
There's plenty of bespoke programs and macros that run on every enterprise system. It takes at least a year to figure out how a new OS will work with those. That's not even counting driver issues, hardware issues, and bugs.
Plus there's a productivity issue with switching OS. Do you really want to slow down your staff during a recession?
But specifically for Windows 7, why switch? What is the competitive advantage of doing so? There's no real performance gain. There's no real new features that aren't just bling. Sure, it's a bit more secure, but any IT dept has cobbled something together and locked down XP enough for it to work reasonably well.
No, sorry, I'd have to question the business decision of any company that is going to introduce a new OS that will cost them money, productivity, and still have kinks and bugs in it at this early stage in its release.
In 3-5 years, after much internal testing, sure it would make sense. But right now -- corporate suicide.
I must be getting older.
It doesn't matter what they call it, it's still not as fast, and with a small a footprint as XP?
I remember saying the same thing about XP in regards to Windows 2000... "It's exactly the same, but with a lego-land interface, and a firewall that won't let you use the apps you want, but allows all the viruses in. It's bloated and slow. I want nothing to do with it if I can avoid it."
Then XP SP2 came out: "Well, it's still bloated, but with new hardware it's not bad... At least we can make exceptions to allow our apps to access the network finally. Too bad it has double the footprint of SP1."
Funny how Vista (and a few years) changed our perspective so much... Because it was such a resource hog, it made XP seem tiny.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-microsofts-red-headed-stepchild-075?page=0,1&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-07-13
From the article ...
"I recently spoke with an IT manager who was budgeting for an Office 2010 upgrade from Office 2003. I casually asked him what features he had deemed important enough to justify a $100,000 budget item. He thought for a minute and admitted that he couldn't think of a single one. So I asked the logical follow-up: Why are you buying it? He had no answer for that either. The $100,000 line item disappeared. He's also sticking with XP."
Exactly. This article and summary should both be tagged troll. The only actual news here is that 34% of the companies surveyed already have plans to have it deployed by the end of next year and it's not even released yet!
Now I'm no huge fan of Microsoft, but I'd guess this is about their best pre-release effort ever. They have definitely done some things right this time around.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
If you say so. I'm at a military manufacturing facility, and there are no plans to move away from XP ever. In fact we're more likely to move onto Linux than go to Windows Vista or Windows 7.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
A millitary (manufacturing) facility, running XP?
Does nobody think that this is pretty scary in itself?
Imagine the displays there showing the infamous Playmobil design, and in front of it a big colorful set of buttons that honk when you hit/push them.
And you suddenly have to think of the movie Idiocracy. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.