Vista — CIOs' First Impressions

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.'"

if you're waiting for vista to be stable or secure

[Anonymous Coward]

you'll be waiting a lot more than a year

my firm's Win2k is at SP4 and still isn't

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[redstar427]

My Company waited 18 months before we deployed Windows XP, and mostly just on new computers. There were many bugs in XP's initial release, plus it took approximately a year before all of our key applications officially supported XP.

We normally wait until after the first service pack anyway, since Microsoft has a history of releasing too soon.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[tero]

I worked for a fairly large automotive company (you'd know the name).

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.

Re:Large vs. small companies

[aadvancedGIR]

Last year, I was working for GE (I think we could all agree it is a BIG company) and we were only moving from NT4 to 2K. BTW, we were allowed to keep two NT4 systems because of a couple of apps that weren't ported yet.

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.

Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'?

[jimicus]

OK, so support has ended for NT. But from the perspective of a large, conservative organisation like a bank, that's not necessarily the end of the world.

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 ones - probably not a great deal. (Bear in mind that 95% of organisations don't worry that much about internal threats, despite evidence to suggest that they should).

What work is involved in migrating? Checking every application used across the whole company works, and updating/replacing those which don't. Reimaging (and almost certainly replacing) every workstation.

How much would this cost? Hundreds of thousands in man-hours.

Cost/benefit wise, I can see how it would be hard to justify such a project.