Slashdot Mirror
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.)"
When XP support ends in 2014. By then, Win7 will have been shaken out.
but that dosnt mean 6/10 wont deploy it. I imagine plenty of those are just waiting to see how well or not it plays out for other companies. If 7 Manages everything it promises, im sure plenty will turn to 7 in the end
It's gone from 83% that won't to 59.3%.
Based on that, if MS wait nine months there will be people buying two copies.
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
You don't need a plan - it'll install itself automatically via windows update. And then automatically rat on you for piracy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
6 in 10? not a very big sample!
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
"Have No current Plans" != "Won't Deploy"
Two years ago, my company had "No Current Plans" to move our MS Applications to their 2007 versions, but here we are, with Office/Exchange/Sharepoint all 2007.
"No Current Plans" may just mean just that... they don't have any plans. That's a far stretch from "we won't".
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
I'm all for bashing ms but this sounds like a pretty big number to me.
6 in 10 companies don't want to needlessly spend money and wish to continue using software that does what they need.
What does 7 have that they need and don't have with XP? Does your company replace all the furniture every time Herman Miller comes out with a new line?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think that the point is that it is historically low.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
It's interesting, in that, so many people of the current generation see webapps and centralized computing as the new best thing.
See, some of us old people got into the PC revolution when we were kids because we were rebelling against centralized computing. We hated the account quotas and slowness of shared system resources in college, the straightjackets around information, and we wanted to smash all of that. We saw that giving people power tools like spreadsheets and desktop databases empowered them over the static mainframe systems of old, that a computer was something that you owned, was, well, a personal thing.
Quite frankly, if it wasn't for ISPs being such a PITA about bandwidth for uploads and hosting, and if, honestly, there was more adoption of IPv6 so that everyone could have their own address, we would see a lot more desktop to the internet hosting. A quadcore PC could easily host a blog or a facebook account. Indeed, I would be the next killer application would be a desktop app that lets you do what facebook does, except that you own your data, and the core web service is really only a directory to enable peer to peer communications.
This is my sig.
No, but it runs XP.
Dear lovely Corporation,
Here's a new operating system for you. Awfully sorry about the whole Vista thing, won't happen again.
Love,
Bill and Steve.
Wait... just Steve now.
PS. The Windows 7 Corporate Mega Edition will come with a free chair.
Task Mangler
Yes, this is routine stuff but still think it's news worthy. What Microsoft could pull is to warn of a "critical exploit" in all versions of Windows prior to Windows 7 and make money.
When combined with Software Assurance, this can work to move most businesses to Windows 7.
Trust me, Microsoft knows how businesses think and I am sure personnel have been hired to handle "stubborn" business accounts.
Except "Windows 7" is really just Vista SP3 :-)
(okay, Vista is NT 6.0, Win7 is NT 6.1)
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.
Actually, they're doing a pretty GOOD job. If you can convince 4 out of 10 of your customers to pay for an unnecessary update that nets them no benefit, I'd say that yes, your marketing department certainly did something right.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most companies refuse to upgrade their systems to a new product (at least major product) unless there is 1) pressure from the top, 2) The hardware vendor only sells with that software, 3) a service patch has been released, or 4) they receive such an unbelievable discount it borders on payola.
This is nothing new. This happened with windows NT, XP, 2003, Vista and it will continue to happen. Though most people who have tried windows 7 have stated they loved it. I've had it installed for months now and I have not experienced a single crash and my laptop is running faster with windows 7 then it did vista.
Wait until windows 7 is out for 6 months, has it's first patch and then come out with an verifiable/reliable article saying this information.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Does your company replace all the furniture every time Herman Miller comes out with a new line?
Of coarse!
AIG,INC
Employees are very happy with XP and cringe at change. So many complaints about the ribbon etc. when upgrading to Office 2007. Businesses will change to appease the management, not the employees.
Businesses will also change to appease Microsoft when suddenly they are found to not be abiding by the terms of the license, and the more cost-effective avenue is, interestingly enough, upgrade to [Office 2007|Win 7|Server 2008|etc].
In general, money talks. Businesses probably won't upgrade unless there is significant money to save, or there are feature or security enhancements they need.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
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."
In other news, 99.9% of businesses have no plans to install Linux clients.
Kind of sad that Microsoft peaked with XP SP2, no?
Too funny. XP was not at all their peak. It was the start of the DECLINE. You want a great fast and lean OS that stayed out of the user's way, look at Win 2k.
Everyone on Slashdot harps on XP like it's this great OS, but it is NOT. I remember everyone here bitching about how about XP was compared to 2k (i.e. dog ass slow in comparison etc).
Frankly, if MS would have added decent USB support to Windows 2k, I would never have switched to XP.
They've gone through the same thing with each version of Windows that's been released. In 2003, less than 10% of corporate PCs were carrying XP. In 2005, it had only gone up to 38%. That's an OS that'd been out for more than three years, and was up against the incumbent Win2000. If Win7 can hit about 40% within a year against an incumbent XP, then that's actually incredible progress.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Simply because we're switching the entire fleet of computers to Mac systems. A lot more reliable, a lot less expensive, a lot easier to manage.
No flame to Dell or Microsoft intended but their tandem has been biting the company in the behind for quite a while whether it be annoyingly small issues (roaming profiles not syncing correctly) or larger issues like virus outbreaks (even with full commercial anti-virus software), data loss when using SMB and the worse-than-awful support from Dell.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Microsoft has more or less contributed to the ultimate demise of the PC in the work place. Because of all the features, and the lack of reliability stemming from the complexity of all these features, MS has created a maintenance nightmare. Business critical applications are now all web based (at least at my company, everything from HR to shipping to version control etc.). Can't remember the last time I fired up MS Word (I have used Excel).
So why upgrade? What is the one feature that Windows 7 has that I _NEED_?
More secure? What is 'more'? How about rock solid secure to the point I can deploy without special virus protection? Right now XP seems good enough.
Better manageability? Management at this time seems to be locking out users from doing things that are stupid/dangerous and forcing upgrades to cover vulnerabilities. Please see 1st question.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer promised me something a long time ago.
And this is one delivery they won't miss.
Affectionately yours,
Satan.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
By linking directly to the PDF, the submitter bypassed a summary from ScriptLogic's web page that directly contradicts the summary provided by angry tapir and kdawson:
Hat tip: Ed Bott
This sig intentionally left blank.
Seriously, the economic conditions are the #1 reason our company won't be deploying Windows 7 within the next year.
Our business is heavily tied to the housing market and new business construction (shopping centers, gas stations, dept. stores, etc.) We're still on Windows XP on our workstations and laptops (about 50 machines total). A migration to Windows 7 would basically involve buying all new hardware too, because other than maybe 3 or 4 of the desktops we bought most recently, the rest are SLOW with XP, much less Windows 7.
Right now, we have no interest in changing anything unless the economy improves (which is doubtful it will lead to a big increase in sales for us before the next year is out).
And honestly, like another person said who posted here - there's a very real possibility to moving to Macs if we had to do a wholesale purchase of new hardware.... A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable around here. But since then, several employees have purchased new iMacs for use at home, and all have very positive things to say about them. We have a few applications we use which are only available for the Windows platform, but honestly, we could serve these just fine over our Terminal Server. The Microsoft remote desktop client for OS X works pretty well. As the systems administrator, I'd like a Mac workstation environment here, because it would practically eliminate spyware/virus hassles and save thousands per year on anti-virus software subscriptions. From what I've seen with Windows 7 so far, it has a HUGE number of configurable options buried in it, for everything imaginable. It embodies the typical MS idea that "more is more!", and it's going to be a huge undertaking building a comprehensive group policy to enforce across a LAN/WAN to lock down all the settings the way you want them for your corporate deployment. OS X tends to present the OS to the user the way Apple intended it to be, and many things aren't even configurable without 3rd. party "hacks". That's not always something a home "power user" finds as a positive, but I think it's beneficial for a business setting.
And XP is 5.1. It's just a number to deal with crappy program version number compatibility.
LOL. You don't get it, do you?
Windows 9x (DOS) ... Windows ME (DOS) ... Windows NT (NT3.5) ... XP (NT5.1) ... Windows 7 (NT6.1)
Windows NT (NT3.1)
Windows NT (NT4.0)
Windows 2000 (NT5.0)
Windows Vista (NT6.0)
If you can't recognise the incremental changes in the DOS line, or the similarly incremental changes in the different NT lines, than I'd suggest looking a bit more closely. By incremental, I'm referring to both version numbers and the OS itself.
REAL VIRTUALITY, Seattle, Thursday 2099 -- Microsoft Corporation has announced a limited one-off extension of availability of its Windows XP operating system to April 2101 after criticism from large customers and analysts. This is the fifty-sixth extension of XP's availability since 2008.
Through successive releases of Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system, demand for XP has remained an important factor for businesses relying on stable XP-specific software and installations, who have pushed back strongly against the software company's attempts to move them to later versions. Windows administration skills have become rare in recent years and consultants have demanded high fees. Reviving Windows administrators from cryogenic freezing has proven insufficient to fill the market gap, as almost all begged to work on COBOL instead.
"Windows XP is currently in the extremely very prolonged super-extended support phase and Microsoft encourages customers to migrate to Windows for Neurons 2097 as soon as feasible," said William Gates V, CEO and great-grandson of the company founder. "Spare change?"
Microsoft Corporation, along with Monsanto Corporation and the RIAA, exists as a protected species in the Seattle Memorial Glass Crater Bad Ideas And Warnings To The Future National Park in north-west Washington on the radioactive remains of what was once the planet Earth, under the protection of our Linux-based superintelligent robot artificial intelligence overlords. Company revenues for 2098 were over $15.
http://rocknerd.co.uk