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Vista — CIOs' First Impressions
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Dec 05, 2006 05:22 AM
from the don't-trust-but-verify dept.
from the don't-trust-but-verify dept.
lizzyben writes "Baseline magazine recently interviewed CIOs and IT consultants to get their take on Microsoft's Vista and is reporting that 'Most big companies will wait at least a year before deploying Vista to make sure the operating system is stable and that third-party applications work well with it, the beta testers say.'"
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WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:5, Funny)
What crackpot moderator tagged this funny? I work for a medium size bank and we are deploying XP right now. It should be finished by early March.
Parent
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Will the desktops magically stop working? No.
Does a migration solve any existing problems which they haven't already solved somehow? Probably not.
What is the risk of sticking with NT 4 on the desktop? No more security updates.
How does that represent a risk? Well, with a reasonably carefully designed network with internal firewalls as well as perimeter
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And the person who signs off that change will be internal, not an outside vendor.
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Yes the person who signs off on it would be internal.
But that's not what runs through business-types heads. They are thinking that if it breaks at all then they are in trouble, where as if it breaks with a currently supported hardware/software then they have someone to call, even if vender support can't do anything.
Yes it's illogical, no it makes little to no sence. I agree that just sticking with what works is usually th
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because it's true!
ah me!
Hey Slashdot, can we stop seeing stories about how nobody's going to use Vista, please? Seriously, we get the idea.
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Current place is planning on doing Office 2007 within a few months however vista will probably be a year plus, and that was with microsoft sending people out here and talking to managers.
While personally I cannot wait for Office 2007, new toys, I am not looking forward to vista for both work or personnal use.
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Now see, personally I prefer office 97 so long as I'm not on a system with multiple monitors where O97 screws up, but I am looking forward to Vista for work. Not at home - I'm all-Linux there now. But I must run Windows at work (or OSX, but I've found I prefer Windows to be honest) and I would like some of the new and fun crap in vista to be on my system.
Why don't you want vista
Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:5, Informative)
We normally wait until after the first service pack anyway, since Microsoft has a history of releasing too soon.
Parent
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So it is not unusual at all if a company is a few years behind. I remember working on a Windows 3.x application in 1998/1999, because the customer's IT was still running on that version.
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And they will not stop because it costs money. And do you have any idea how hard is to update Excel spreadsheets with a lot of version specific scripting? Plus their system is quite complicated and heavily networked.
That's true for many companies. Don't fix it if it ain't broken.
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The problem then becomes: if it breaks, how do you fix it?
What if one of those 386's breaks down? It's not like you can run down the store and buy a replacement CPU or RAM. Somehow they'll have to upgrade in the future, if only because of the lack of available spare parts. Incrementally upgrading might be painful, but not upgrading at all might be many times more costly when stuff starts to break.
Think about all the COBOL in the world
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As long as you don't need more than 640x480 16-colors, Win 3.1 runs just fine on modern hardware. You'll need to provide a more modern DOS if you want to use large hard
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My company switched to XP (I think, it was before my time) in 2004, which is about 3 years since its initial release, and we're a development firm. A lot of places take stability very seriously, and even those which don't are usually at least cautious. A year sounds pretty reasonable as an average.
Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:5, Informative)
We started XP deployment for the IT units around March -06 and it's probably just about finished now and moving on to the other parts of the corporation (and ends around next summer I'd guess, not working there anymore).
Will be a long long time before Vista hits their user desktops (probably around 2010, give or take few years), deploying tens of thousands of desktops throughout megacorps is not anything you want to do every year.
Parent
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We just rolled out WinXP last year (2005) as a replacement for NT4. That's...what, four years after WinXP came out? So I'd expect our company to move to Vista sometime in 2010 or 2011.
As long as... (Score:2)
As long as those are internal machines on a closed network, then yes, stay with what works.
if you're waiting for vista to be stable or secure (Score:2, Informative)
my firm's Win2k is at SP4 and still isn't
Re:if you're waiting for vista to be stable or sec (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:if you're waiting for vista to be stable or sec (Score:2, Funny)
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response (Score:2, Insightful)
"this is going to cost us how much per user? it's more secure? seriously? what about xyz? it works with that? o really? have you tested it yourself? your an employee at Microsoft and you haven't had a chance to use it yourself? call me back in a year"
Re:response (Score:5, Insightful)
I am an employee at Microsoft, and you better darn believe that they push us hard to make sure we are running Vista. A lot of people have been running it since early alphas, providing a lot of feedback.
I'm a field engineer, so I spend most of my time on site at large customers. A lot of them are excited by the features in it - just like they are excited about the features in
People aren't switching because they don't want to. They aren't switching right now because large companies have lengthy install processes that force things to take a long time. It doesn't matter if it's Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, or a host of other things. I'm sure we can find people running solidly on 2.2 kernels, with not a lot of inkling of jumping to 2.6.
It's just the way big businesses operate, and is generally independent of the actual software being discussed. It's a shame that it always seems to get spun that way.
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I'm really having a hard time understanding Microsoft's urgency to push it out to corporate customers first. In my experience (and reaffirmed by countless posts in this thread) large customers are practically never on the leading edge of new software, especially OS software. If anything, Microsoft should concentrate on consumers, they're usually the early adopters of the new and shiny. But what do I
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Second, big customers take a long time to roll out. Give them a 3 month head start!
Developers, Developers, Developers! If even one big fortune 500 moves to Vista first, that's dozens of high profile ISVs that have to release updates now. That's more apps "vista ready"
Delusions abound (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but some of us really aren't switching because we don't want to. We write portable C++ here. You know the Visual Studio application the majority of our developers prefer to use? VC++ 6. You know, the ancient, pre-standard, poor-code-generating one. Why? Because we write portable C++. All the .net stuff in the world has zero value to us.
From our perspective, later VC++ versions have overall been one screw-up after another. The performance is abysmal; we don't care whether it's because they're written in .net, or because the architecture was changed to support all the other .net languages, we just see a UI that's slow to unresponsive way more than it ever used to be and a debugger that keeps screwing up when it used to be almost 100% reliable. We want help to show us the standard library calls and language rules, not a zillion .net-related buzzwords. We want the old source browsing features that just worked, not a new set of substandard not-quite-replacements that took three major releases to get and still can't do as much as we had in 1998.
It's not that there aren't good features in the more recent VS releases. Some of us even prefer to use those releases. But most of us don't, and it's got nothing to do with roll-out times and everything to do with the fact that they simply aren't as effective as tools that help us do our jobs. Please don't kid yourself that it's anything else.
We can and do take exactly the same view with operating systems. We will upgrade to Vista when there is some advantage in doing so. Right now, we run a heterogeneous network with many different versions of Windows, UNIX flavours, Linux, MacOS, etc. and it works. Based on our experiences upgrading OSes previously, changing desktops to a new version of Windows is risking a show-stopper for the entire development group until a patch to let our systems interoperate properly is released, which may take a considerable time and we can't control. No sane manager is going to authorise that, and again, it's not because we can't do it faster, it's because from bitter experience we just don't trust MS software to get it right until there's a lot of outside experience to say they have.
And it's the same deal with office suites, too. We could upgrade to Office 2007 pretty much as soon as it's released. We have sensible software management procedures in place, and global licensing arrangements with MS. But until we know we can open documents from older versions in 2007 and vice versa, which again was not the case with some previous upgrades causing us much pain, we aren't going to trust the upgrade. Even then, we're going to take some convincing that it's worth risking a hit for introducing the new UI, that there are new features to justify the upgrade (no point disrupting everyone for no benefit), etc.
Sorry to be such a downer, but I read some serious delusion in your post. People do avoid upgrading because the newer product is a risk and/or lacks obvious benefits, regardless of any delays caused by procedures in updating systems.
Parent
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First, you aren't bursting my bubble. I came to MS as someone who never, ever, though they would go work for them. I run Linux on several home computers, write and speak about Ruby, have run JUGs and LUGs, etc.
I didn't mean to come across that everyone is all giddy and that the only reason they aren't upgrading is because of corporate policies. But I'm sure you all would like to use a lot of the new features - if it fit in your environ
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As far as TFS merge - I'll look into that and put up some info on my site if I find out any more info.
What's wrong with this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Jonah Hex
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You do a BIOS upgrade of your mainboard to add support for a new processor version, because you want to upgrade. Vista detects the change and blocks access to your data
Large vs. small companies (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as other companies are concerned, everyone is right - it could be 5 or 10 years before they upgrade. I'm the CIO of a small/medium business, and we are still running Windows 98 on some of our non-networked machines. Smaller companies won't invest a penny in upgrades until they're forced to do so, which won't be until Microsoft stops creating XP security updates, or until enough applications are released that only run on Vista.
Re:Large vs. small companies (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got a lot of customers who have a near zero cost going to Vista and Office 2007 as far as licensing is concerned, but they're all talking a year or more to do it and some are saying they may never switch. Why? Enormous retraining and help desk costs associated with the new ribbon UI in Office (which personally I *really* like), and the OS cost is minimal when compared to the new hardware cost and the cost of replacing hardware "in the field".
The place I personally have concern about Vista support very quickly is the exact opposite of what you said -- its the small companies. When you get below 20-30 people, most companies buy whatever computers they can get for the lowest price. They don't have enterprise licenses and will take whatever OS comes on that system... and those systems are going to come with Vista by default. My girlfriend, for example, works at a company of 50 people or so... and when they need a new PC, the IT guy goes down to Best Buy and gets whatever is on sale.
Our 2007 release planning is only targeting Vista for those very small customers (and as such, we're not spending much time looking at it or qualifying it on products that a small customer wouldn't use).
But you make an important point -- small companies (and a lot of big companies) NEVER upgrade OS's. They are still running Windows 98 on systems that haven't died or been replaced for functional reasons... and there's not many functional reasons to replace a 2ghz XP machine for a few years at least.
Parent
I agree (Score:2)
Re:Large vs. small companies (Score:5, Informative)
Big corps didn't abandon Win95/98 because they want shiny or powerfull stuff, they did because NT4 or 2K is easier to maintain when you have hundreds of desktops and every up-to-date commercial application run on them without much hassle. They may consider a switch to XP and some already did, but Vista is just too young to be taken seriously by a big corp.
Parent
Let alone large companies (Score:5, Interesting)
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Of course, I disagree with the later half of your statement. I'm positive that the next PC I buy will not come with a free copy of Vista.
It WILL however come with a free copy of OS X.
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Where did you hear anyone was handing out free copies of Vista with new PCs? China?
Why it can be complex (Score:2)
From what I have seen of large (Fortune 500) environments there are a number of reason why a roll out can take a loooonnnnnnngggg time:
1) Scale matters. The more equipment you have to update the longer it takes. Updating desktops for 50K + people can take a long time. In addition, it would probably be too expensive, both in overall cost and lost productivity, to update everyone at the same time
Blackhats? (Score:2)
Im curious: Where does this leave the blackhats? Are they going to unleash their work as soon as Vista hits the retail market, or are they going to wait until an appreciable number of enterprise environments have deployed it in order to maximize their damage and give Microsoft a black eye?
Personally, I am hoping they do the latter.