Vista — CIOs' First Impressions 99
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.'"
WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Let alone large companies (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:response (Score:1, Interesting)
I work in big business and I agree. I'm not keen on putting out Vista the day it comes out cause I have no particular reason to, I also don't plan on upgrading my Ubuntu to the lastest at the moment, nor do I have any reason to upgrade my FreeBSD box to the latest stable or unstable - it still runs exactly what I require it for.
Now I know this is Slashdot and cause I haven't jumped on the bandwagon this will be dumped into the land of -1 posts, but I feel pretty safe in saying that no matter what the OS, if you are jumping on installing it corporate wide on day 1, than you are a fool and should look into other work. Vista isn't getting installed everywhere not because it's MS or whatever nitpicking you have managed to pick out about it, Vista isn't getting installed everywhere this year, cause it's new and it's not a requirement for anything.