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Time To Dump XP?
An anonymous reader writes "Gartner is saying it's time to plan your migration now (if you havent already done it). I for one know my company still has loads of users still on XP, citing training costs (time and money) rather than software license fees. Is my company alone in wanting to stay in the 1990s or is Windows 7 the way forward?"
Another example of why companies like Gartner are useless. They're little more another source of advertising for computer companies.
Your decisions on your OS should be driven by your needs first and foremost. If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch? Switch if YOU need to, not because someone like Gartner says "Hey you, get out of the past and get with the future. All the cool kids are running *insert OS here*"
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
If someone needs to be trained to use Windows 7 then there is something wrong with them.
I am at a Fortune 500 and everything is still XP. Most companies I know are not migrating at this time.
Although, if they have to retrain (Citing time and cost) Plus the cost of a new license then why not move to Linux and at least drop one of the costs (Licensing)
FOr business do you really need anything more than XP?
The problem with XP is not that it'snot perfectly satisfactory but that it's not maintained. New software won't be written for it. That's the reason to migrate.
On the other hand one could make a lateral move. Linux is more like XP in feel than even Win 7 is. And software is in production for Linux. So perhaps a lateral move is not so unthinkable in terms of training costs at this particular point in time.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
God no, you're not alone. We need stable environments for consistency of software development. We have a dozen home-grown tools, and 2x that from open source type things, and jumping service patches is a holy pain, much less an entire OS. We were still supporting Win2k machines until two years ago.
"Migration" is in Microsoft's interest, not yours.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Flamebait, I know. But honestly, having used 7 for a while on my personal machines and having to still use XP at work, it's 7 all the way. I shall pretend that Vista never happened.
Yeah but MS didn't get XP right till august of 2004. and why was the parent modded funny? Are mods modding based on sigs now??
The reason I'm not getting 7 is because.... I already have an XP license which works perfectly fine on my 6 year old P4. It's not exactly cheap to upgrade, since you say: "Just get more RAM". Assuming you want 2GB RAM, with a typical machine having 2 or 3 DDR memory slots, thus needing 2 sticks of 1GB at about 35.99$/piece (Quick search on newegg.com, you might find better deals).
Add in the license for Windows 7 (Upgrade is out, because you're on XP).... 99.99$ for the Systems Builders 32-bit version (source: also newegg)...
Total: 171.97$/seat and that's ignoring workhours....
Only to upgrade... Which has zilch benefit....
...but we just rebranded them as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
-Brought to you by VMWare and Wyse.
Fuck dumping XP. Dump Windows.
BUt then most /. posts are redundant. Good going.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Train for what?
Can people not just figure out where they moved the buttons you click on to?
As someone who does IT/support for hundreds of computers daily, believe me when I say training is always an issue. People tend to memorize the exact steps necessary to complete a task, including the appearance and location of buttons. If an icon changes or a button gets moved, they don't try to intuit where it might have gone or look in menus that sound like they're related to the function they're looking for. Instead they react as if their world has been turned upside down, and they just give up and call for help.
That still doesn't justify the upgrade if everything works fine....
...is my company still using Windows XP SP2, but we are still using IE6. Feh...and they complained that Audacity was a security risk because it was "open source, so anyone could hack it".
You should tell them that XP has some open source bits - namely BSD TCP/IP stack - in it. That should have them scrambling to migrate to 7, then.
Not that it would make things any more secure, in the circumstances...
The 7 taskbar is also very intuitive. If an application has more than one window open, you see a little stack of tiles. if you hover over the stack, you get a bunch of live previews of that application's windows.
Seriously, if you are so bad at using computers that you need training to go from the "number of windows and window list" of XP to "stack of tiles and window thumbnails", you are an automaton who can and probably should be replaced by someone younger and more mentally flexible.
If you are valuable enough for your non-computer skills, then your company should pay to send you to a week-long computer skills course at the local community center. Shouldn't cost more than $100.
What does Windows 7 bring to your business that XP doesn't?
Shiny. Can't really think of anything else apart from the ability to quickly arrange two windows side by side.
Would that same benefit be provided by other operating systems?
Yes, OSX contains a lot of Shiny but the programs I use every day don't run on it.
Is the difference between Windows 7 and FreeBSD (for example) enough to justify the license cost (not just the initial cost, but the requirement to track licenses as well)?
Yes. My programs don't run on FreeBSD.
If you're going to need retraining anyway, it seems like now would be a good time to consider other alternatives.
Or just stick with XP for now...
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
No, seriously. What killer new features does Windows 7 have that are worth the time and expense of an upgrade from XP? The only one I've heard mentioned, that it sucks less than Vista, doesn't apply to XP users.
When it gets down to it, there are two main reasons to upgrade to Windows 7: Eventually, it will become impossible to get new machines running XP. And Microsoft really wants your money. Neither of these benefits the user.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
mods should now have their names signed on everything they mod so they can be properly flamed for idiotic mistakes.
Why is it time exactly? What benefit would most companies exactly get from upgrading? If everything works and there is no foreseeable change in the software that the business runs to conduct business, why spend hundreds of dollars per computer for a new OS and maybe some extra RAM to do exactly what they are doing now?
All "fixed that for you" posts are not just redundant. They're also stupid.
I think the current and recent moderator pool is from the newer users who are used to moderation on sites like reddit and digg where people tend to vote emotionally, and unused to slashdot's trend of promoting comments rather than demoting them.
It doesn't help matters any that the new(er) metamoderation system is completely unlike the old (working) system, and that metamoderation seems to do absolutely nothing these days...
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
I'd cite the same reason business will give: "Give me a single business reason to migrate. Tell me what Windows 7 will do for me that Windows XP isn't doing for me today.". Note: "XP's being EOL'd." is a very weak business reason. The primary benefit's to the vendor, my only benefit is ending up exactly where I started. Various features of Windows 7 itself aren't good business reasons either. I don't run Windows for it's own features, I run it for the applications I use every day that need Windows underneath them to run. "But your applications aren't going to support XP anymore, you have to upgrade Windows to run them." also isn't a very good business reason, again it's arguing that I need to spend a lot of money and time and effort getting right where I already am today. It's also circular, because my application vendors are going "Microsoft isn't supporting XP anymore, so you're going to have to upgrade to new versions of the applications that'll run on Windows 7.".
Now, "Windows 7 provides better security and you won't have as many problems with malware." might be a better business reason. Still weak, but better. But it'll get me to thinking: what makes me think Windows 7 really will be any better? Many of the vulnerabilities in Windows come not from Windows but from things like Internet Explorer and Outlook. I can eliminate many of them by just not having those things around, by using Firefox and Thunderbird and the like instead. Except, oh look, I can't because Microsoft doesn't allow me to remove IE. It's always there, it's always active and it's always used for certain things. And Windows 7 doesn't change that. Other vulnerabilities are caused by things like Windows' file-sharing capabilities. Except, why are my desktops even sharing files? They aren't network file servers, they've no business even having the ability to give other machines network access to their filesystems at all. Except that Windows won't let me turn that service off without crippling Windows itself, and Windows 7 doesn't change that. So why am I spending time and effort upgrading to a version of Windows that has the same basic vulnerabilities built into it's design that my existing one does, as opposed to say spending that effort convincing my application vendors to support an OS where I can completely remove the things I don't need and not have to worry about whether there's vulnerabilities in them anymore?
I'll probably have to migrate this year as a purely technical matter, because support won't be there and I can't afford not to have security updates and AV support. But it won't be because I'm deriving any real benefit from the upgrade, it'll be because a vendor needs more upgrade revenue and is in a position to twist my arm. And as a pure business matter I'm going to be looking seriously at ways to get that vendor out of a position where he can twist my arm anymore, because it's just not good business to be at someone else's mercy.
Yes but it was also sarcastic so he could have been shooting for funny. and now he's stuck with informative and crying in his coffee, once again misunderstood by a cruel world that never comprehends his jests.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
. If an icon changes or a button gets moved, they don't try to intuit where it might have gone or look in menus that sound like they're related to the function they're looking for. Instead they react as if their world has been turned upside down, and they just give up and call for help.
Only because it means that they can sit around doing nothing for awhile.
"His name was James Damore."
Vista is loaded on the 'corporate' PC but XP is on the development PC. XP works, it's stable. End of story.
Should I have to use or admin your products, all I care about is that you actually know how to develop for Vista or later and that your product follows its security model and conventions.
There are plenty of apps developed for Vista and 7 that do obnoxious shit like default putting downloaded files in ~\Documents\Downloads. For fuck's sake, there's ~\Downloads for that, and it works quite nicely. Yes, I'm looking at you, Chrome. Smart enough to avoid UAC by installing into AppData, but ignorant and audacious enough to break the much improved home folder in the same stroke.
If an app did that on Linux or OS X, people would pitch a fit... especially the developers.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Cost is usually rather low on the reasons for wanting to stay with Windows XP. There is an increasing amount of Microsoft phobia in business lately... at all levels. Moving to a "newer" Microsoft product used to bring cheers from the users. Now it brings groans. Why? Lately, it seems, Microsoft has been dumping far too much change on users and it is a burden. To this day, I STILL don't know how to find my way around Office 2007 and now there is Office 2010?!
And in a business sense, change can be expensive. There is downtime, re-training/re-learning, and the cost of mistakes that happen more often when big changes occur. (Almost no one ever cites the potential cost of mistakes during a migration... they can be quite costly at times.)
Win 7 has had some of its speed issues sorted out. But some of the glaring problems and failures from Vista simply remain and are not going to be fixed. Vista was not a good release, but unlike with ME where MS changed the underpinnings, this time they have kept them.
There has been some movement in terms of applications being recoded and reworked, or simply versioned up to close the hole, and many driver problems have been resolved. But older drivers, programs, applications - all largely the same problems as under Vista. Microsoft threatened to provide shims for none working programs and applications, but these are a sticky plaster over a bigger problem. We don't live in the 1990s any more. The enforced upgrade of hundreds of machines then now equats to thousands of machines (assuming a portion of general growth). The idea people are just going to hand over ever larger bundles of money for beta level PRE SP1 releases is really quite over. Given the state of the economy, and given the pain of trying to move, many will simply hold on until they absolutly have to - and will only change then.
Microsoft made the largest error in their history with 7. They changed the look and feel, moving many items around for no real reason apart from making it'new'. Thus the cost is retraining. They also chose the time to introduce changes at every level, breaking drivers, applications and programs, and the new OS only has partial compatability. They would have been vastly better breaking their OS into 32 bit legacy and brand new 64 bit, with a complete break from the past. They should have continued to fully rework and support XP and 2003 as the end of line 32 bit market supply, and continued to make money out of that. At the same time they should have introduced win 7 (or you may say Vista) as the 64 bit future OS. The infexible approach of saying 'we are ending xp' 'move' has no real reflection in terms of where the world sits on this.
In terms of 7 its still riddled with pathetic bugs (the deletion of a user and inability to create without having to clean registry all the way back to Vista is still there) and application, driver, and program issues are just as bad as they were with Vista. The fact is 7 has been sold across the tech world because some people wanted something new. And they for whatever reason don't see the bugs, or prefer not to talk about them. Or they cite its a new MS release and say its 'always been like this, and it will be sorted by an SP'. However, again, this is not the 1990's and people should not be 'beta' testing full releases for the vendor. Its riddled with issues on SMB/CIFS with older devices, it has numerous problems in terms of WiFi, the entire area of networking including VPN (PPTP is a spectacular screw up, dropped connections, or connections that no longer work as they should) - not to mention retarded control panel and network screens.
The only kudos I can really give it, is that the Vista speed issues and complete sluggishness of that has been turned round. But most of the very core problems remain, and are not going to be fixed. With that as a background, I think many people will simply not move yet, no matter how much Gartner thinks they should. The days of IT being handed money like confetti really died quite some time ago and the reality of this remains today.
We`re all equal
If XP was released in 2001, then it's tech was developed in the 90's. Indeed the NT kernel it used goes back quite a way.
I'm not sure if you've ever had experience supporting people, either over the phone or in person, but a surprisingly large number of people immediately lock up and scream for help if anything the least bit out-of-place happens. Maybe a Word toolbar gets rearranged somehow, or they accidentally move an icon somewhere, or their Big Project drops off the Recently Used list... stuff like that utterly stops workflow. The concept of fumbling around, trying stuff out, or otherwise figuring it out is a foreign concept since they're still in the camp of fearing they're going to break it or get a "virus" somehow.
You can argue they're unemployable, but I'd hazard to say even a majority of the average non-technical office workers are like this. Now throw in Windows 7 and IE8, and suddenly there's a lot of little differences they'll have to learn and/or get used to. Maybe throw Office 2007/2010 with the ribbon in if perhaps they were still using an old version of Office as well. I do tend to think the fear and cost is overstated, but you can't discount it entirely either.
Hardware is cheap. Migration and Training is not so cheap.
XOR should never have been used. It should be IOR(inclusive OR) and OR since in Latin languages 'or' almost always implies an exclusive choice.
Win7 just works. It's stable. It's faster and feature-rich and up-to-date. It has a lot of great short-cuts and productivity enhancers in the UI. End of story.
That's what so many IT pro's don't understand about Vista and 7. They install it and immediately turn a bunch of new features off and revert to the "Classic" Start menu.
:D
Meanwhile, while they're hunting for an application buried deep inside some terrible folder hierarchy that stretches across the whole screen, I tap the Windows key, type the first three letters of an Application name, hit enter, and I'm there. Meanwhile, my colleagues whine about the lack of an "Up" button while I just click the back button on my mouse or the folder name in the breadcrumb bar.
I call the classic start menus and such "I fear change" mode. Fitting, I think
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I wasn't strictly speaking to development. Development is only one aspect of using a computer in a sea of virtually limitless possibilities.
Given that there are two Windows OS's that are newer and have better features tailored to the way people use Windows, software development included, it stands to reason that, even as a developer, if you don't know or are too shortsighted to see these benefits more recent versions of Windows offers, you should still target NT6 as the primary platform for your application irrespective of its compatibility with previous Windows versions.
It is woefully ignorant for a software publisher to restrict their customers to a technically inferior, harder to use operating system because its developers are too ignorant or stubborn to learn what newer ones have to offer.
I understand that I'm ranting a little bit, and my argument doesn't apply to legacy applications, but it's incredibly pig-headed and stupid for a piece of software developed after 2006 to be completely incompatible with NT6+. It's irresponsible and lazy, and is tantamount to targeting a web app at IE6 only. I'm sure I don't need to express why that is a really stupid idea.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
the learning curve was very high: from display settings to network settings to machine name to how the Start menu works, I was starting from scratch.
And that is why after 14 years working in IT, I finally quit. I got sick of constantly having to relearn new things and have old skills that I possess no longer be of any practical use.
We run development on macs. We can then load Windows XP or Windows 7 Via Boot Camp or parallels. (Development macs all have at least 8GB some now with 16GB of RAM). OSX is stable, unix, and we can run windows exactly like it says on the tin: in a window. Heck we can even run OSX, XP, 7, and a flavor or two of linux all at the same time.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Windows 7 is also pretty much essential for SSDs. XP and Vista treat them the same way they treat hard drives, not aligning filesystem metadata to blocks and putting it in the middle of the disk to reduce average seek times. Only 7 supports TRIM too.
The new taskbar is pretty good too IMHO.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC