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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
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)
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.
Hundreds of employees each spending 20+ minutes to figure out where the fuck the print button went in the new version of Office, for example. No, clicking on the ball in the top corner of the screen is not even close to intuitive, and no, there isn't anyone that actually clicks on the take a tour of $new_product to find these things out. Even if they did, multiply that half hour to hour of tour across an enterprise, and it is significant.
The reason I'm not getting 7 is because.... I already have an XP license which works perfectly fine on my 6 year old P4. It's not exactly cheap to upgrade, since you say: "Just get more RAM". Assuming you want 2GB RAM, with a typical machine having 2 or 3 DDR memory slots, thus needing 2 sticks of 1GB at about 35.99$/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.
I have a PhD in computer science and still use XP (when I'm not using Linux) because of the "training costs" of migration. Am I going to go take a class on Windows 7? No. But it's annoying and time-consuming to hunt around for things and figure out how they're done now, set up all the network printer connections again, etc., when I could be getting stuff done, or posting to slashdot :) After switching to Office 2007 about 1 1/2 years ago, I am now accustomed to it, but I *still* don't see what I gained by migrating to the Ribbon interface and re-learning where to find everything. If anything, I still think it's *less* productive than the previous straightforward menu system augmented by toolbars.
You might argue I'll have to migrate eventually so why not now. In the case of Windows 7 that's true, but I did skip Vista entirely and am very glad I did.
Again, I am not against keeping up with technology and retraining myself but only when there is a benefit to doing so.
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.
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.
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'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.
I'm not sure how 8 years of learning how to create your own computer software systems has anything to do with learning someone else's (possibly crappy) UI.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Every time someone talks about how great XP is working, I have this odd compulsion to point out the Linux equivalent.
If you ran Linux systems that old, you would be using a 2.4.18 kernel (remember LinuxThreads?). You would be using OSS, because ALSA was still incomplete and PulseAudio hadn't come around yet. Your system's compiler would be gcc-2.95, your python implementation would be 1.5.x and run none of today's code, you would still be on an XFree86 server that doesn't support any graphics card made after ~2004. Your web browser would be Mozilla, because Firefox hadn't come around yet (and today's Firefox doesn't support kernels that old). Your OpenSSL libraries would have started at version 0.9.6b, and been patched roughly twice a year since release.
The odd thing is, were this Linux you would be flamed for trying to get modern things running with such old versions. But as this is Windows, you feel entitled to complain about having to re-learn something new and brag about the "effort" you save.
As somebody who programs for both Linux and Windows for a living - your "saved effort" comes at a significant cost to me. It is increasingly hard to write Windows software that works on both XP and Win7; every new feature has to be written twice, once using the right Vista+ API and once to degrade gracefully on XP. Linux is marginally better - there's a new trendy library-of-choice every few years, but at least old ones disappear before too long. Hardware tends to be less than 5 years old, Linux installs tend to be less than 5 years old; yet tech-savvy XP users somehow feel entitled to stay with a 9-year-old OS. Most people don't keep cars that long; why expect an operating system to last?
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
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.
Actually there is a huge difference. For me, a primary motivation for updating linux is getting driver support for new devices. On windows, the stable driver abi and supply of 3rd party drivers means XP supports everything on my laptop, even though it came out years after XP was released.
As for python and Mozilla, you don't need the latest kernel to run those. (That's right, I don't update my linux kernel unless I have a specific need, either. Call me crazy).
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
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