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Microsoft IT

Vista — CIOs' First Impressions 99

Posted by ScuttleMonkey 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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Vista — CIOs' First Impressions More

Vista — CIOs' First Impressions

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  • WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by metalcup ( 897029 ) <metalcup&gmail,com> on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @05:33AM (#17111228)

    '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,
    How long did most companies wait before deploying Win XP (or win 2000) after it was released? Is a one year wait 'normal' for IT across companies?

    • Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @05:37AM (#17111262)
      Most companies are expecting to deploy WinXP this spring.

      • Re:WinXP/2K 'incubation'? (Score:5, Funny)

        by dc29A ( 636871 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:33AM (#17111556)
        Most companies are expecting to deploy WinXP this spring.

        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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by LordSnooty ( 853791 )
          I think five years is over-egging the pudding somewhat. Still, for these huge banks it must be difficult to roll it out worldwide. Surely that's the issue, rather than waiting to see if it's matured (I think it's gone a bit off now)
          • Sprint (cell provider) just started rolling out XP as their standard platform when I quit last May

        • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Hell, one of our clients (a one of the larger UK based finance companies) has just put back it's head-office upgrade again. They are still on NT4+IE55 and are officially likely to be for at least another six months (unofficially, I don't think it'll happen at all, ever, unless their outsourced IT people simply start refusing to maintain the older systems, which will be a long time coming as they make their money whether or not an upgrade happens). Funfunfun.

          While most of the people we deal with are 2K/XP
          • Indeed; It's only in the last year that at work we have standardised to WinXP and even now we still have a big chunk of 2k boxes, two or three 98se, and an NT box in some dusty room some where. I don't expect Vista to start coming in until our vendors start forcing it on new replacement pc's and considering we only just finished our roll over that may be a good long while. Oh and half of our apps work better under Linux (using WINE) than with Vista so that will have to change. :P

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Knara ( 9377 )
              I still deal with on a regular basis (twice this week so far) with WinNT4 machines on people's desks, and we "standardized" to WinXP over 2 years ago. Sometimes that shit just hangs around forever, y'know?
        • but that still doesn't tell us what most companies are doing. maybe it was a legitimate joke.
        • Medium-sized? I work for one of the biggest insurance companies in the country and we're struggling to implement XP here. Most people really do miss Win2k
        • it's funny...

          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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reapman ( 740286 )
        That isn't funny, I seriously doubt we'll have XP rolled out on all 2600 desktops here before Spring. I know of several companies that are just starting now. It's not uncommon to wait for everyone else to find it's faults, and at least a Service Pack or two.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I know of one major UK ISP that still has NT4 as standard on their call centre machines and I suspect they're not alone. If it works, and you can still get support for it, why change?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by will_die ( 586523 )
      At the place I use to work at they did install XP until end of 2004.
      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.

      • While personally I cannot wait for Office 2007, new toys, I am not looking forward to vista for both work or personnal use.

        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)

      by redstar427 ( 81679 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:48AM (#17111628)
      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.
    • Most companies use their existing system until they see a compelling need to upgrade. Because a migration always costs money.
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by jackharrer ( 972403 )
        Mitchells and Butlers in UK (very big hospitality corp) still uses Win 3.11. In 2006, on 386 and 486 class computers.
        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.

        • That's true for many companies. Don't fix it if it ain't broken.

          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

          • 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.

            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

        • They are one of the few organisations who could easily migrate to Linux/BSD/Solaris. Wabi supported Win16 very well, and WINE has pretty much full support now. They could keep their existing apps quite easily and move to a more stable platform. Moving from Win32 is a lot harder.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tkdog ( 889567 )
      Wow - now we see the real reason OS X doesn't gain business share!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zootm ( 850416 )

      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)

      by tero ( 39203 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @08:07AM (#17112048)
      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.

      • I work for a large energy company (you'd definitely know the name, and probably hate us)

        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.
        • I would expect your company to move to Windows 2010 sometime in 2015 (as from NT4 to XP there was another version, the Win2000). I wonder what new and nice things will Microsoft put into the next version of its OS in order to attract users... WindowsFS? DirectX 12?
    • My company just deployed Windows XP in this past year. Of course we just finished our Windows 2000 upgrade a year ago. We do plan to go to Vista within the year. I work for a hospital, once we get our main vendor (Epic) to support IE7 we will be starting the migration.
    • I think it mostly depends on the companies computers they currently have in use. The university's athletic department I work for have both XP and 2000 implemented. The computers we have running on 2000 are mostly Dell OptiPlex GX110's that we have setup for the different sports' assistant coaches (we had OptiPlex GX1's, but transitioned them out). Even though the GX110's are still operable, most aren't capable of running XP (we do have a some running XP, but they have memory and hard drive upgrades). Th
    • Well I was using Win98SE until about 2002/2003 a little bit before SP2 came out... also around the same time that companies started using XP migrating from Windows 2000... i think it is SOP to wait until at least the first SP before trying an MS deployment, we have enough trouble keeping up with help tickets to be test driving a new MS OS...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mpaque ( 655244 )
      The Federal Department of Health and Human Services finished rolling out Windows 2000 in 2004, and is in the process of rolling out Windows XP. It takes longer than you'd think to get hardware software and designated desktop and laptop configurations for various programs all spec'd and tested.

      Being a vast centrally administered IT bureaucracy doesn't speed things up, either. When the regional Head Start office in San Francisco needs a change in machine configuration to support an older worker, the reques
    • I work for a very large multinational corporation (almost 10,000 employees) and they are still using NT4 + Win2k and some QNX, and haven't planned on rolling out Windows XP. There were issues with Licensing 6.0, not to mention the fact that if they bought a newer version of Windows chances are it wouldn't work on the older hardware, and if they bought newer hardware they would already come with the updated Windows licenses. So far there is no need for Windows XP, let alone Vista.

  • if you're waiting for vista to be stable or secure (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    you'll be waiting a lot more than a year

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

  • response (Score:2, Insightful)

    by erbbysam ( 964606 )
    I do believe that the correct CEO response on the phone is going to be:
    "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)

      by Anml4ixoye ( 264762 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @07:55AM (#17111978) Homepage
      your an employee at Microsoft and you haven't had a chance to use it yourself?


      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 .NET 2.0 (and 3.0), VS 2005, etc. I've also worked for shops where we were excited about the latest version of Eclipse, Java 5, Ruby on Rails, etc.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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.

        Yeah, but you guys are all millionaires. You can afford to run Vista.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by neoform ( 551705 )
        Perhaps it's both? Big Business-Slowness and that Vista just isn't something they feel the need to jump at?

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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

        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 kn

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by uradu ( 10768 )
        > [...] I spend most of my time on site at large customers. A lot of them are excited by the features in it

        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
        • I don't speak for MS, just get a paycheck for them. But my guess is that most consumers get their OS's through whatever is installed on the computer when they buy it. And Vista is a small part of everything that just got released - new Office, new Team Systems, Source control, process management, communications - there is a crapload of stuff coming out, most of it targetted at, um, errr, [I don't want to say it...], enabling businesses. ;)
        • first, they are under Software Assurance and Microsoft wants to pretend to give them value for their money by giving it to them first. Realize the first companies to bite for SA on XP got NOTHING for their money then the 3 years ran out!

          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)

        by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @10:51AM (#17113800)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by t0rkm3 ( 666910 )
          To add to the above post:

          Working in SAN, and NAS made me very twitchy about upgrading Winders. Service Packs included. You never know when a super-stealth change in the way scsi.sys and the registry confer about LUN references will be in the new SP.

          With other OS's, if I have a question I can look at the /proc system, the dev tree, and the source comments and figure out any changes. With Winders I hunt around in the registry and find out what has changed... and then we have to figure out how 'Winders' wants

        • Sorry to be such a downer, but I read some serious delusion in your post.

          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

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 )
        Too bad VS2005 is flaky as hell under Vista. No way we're upgrading until at least SP1, and SP2 for VS2005, since SP1 for VS2005 will not have the needed tweaks to make it run right on Vista. And give us a real TFS merge tool while we're at it, the current one is a piece of trash that won't merge XML files. We just blew the last two days writing our own XML merging tool since the TFS merger could find no pattern beyond "They're both completely different".

        Vista: The next PS3...
        • Flaky? I haven't seen that, and I'd be happy to bring up whatever it is you are seeing with flakiness. The only thing I was aware of was I think around some of the debugging features.

          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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jo42 ( 227475 )
        Excited? Who is excited?? Most of us are going "Oh bugger, more c*rp from Microsoft".

    • ... it's more secure? seriously? ...

      It depends on how you re-define secure. Even malware from 2004 [zdnet.co.uk] will still run.

  • What's wrong with this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jonah Hex ( 651948 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [smtodxeh]> on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @07:10AM (#17111708) Homepage Journal
    One security enhancement in Vista that may be complicated to use is BitLocker, which encrypts the contents of a hard drive so that a stolen laptop can't become a source of pilfered intellectual property. BitLocker's policy of looking for changes in a PC's Basic Input/Output System--the code run by a computer every time it's booted up--may occasionally activate the shutdown mechanism when it isn't needed; for instance, after a systems administrator has upgraded the hard drive. BitLocker "is a very good idea," says the University of Florida's Schmidt. "But it can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."
    Let's see, you upgrade the hard drive and since the BIOS detects the hard drive has been changed you can no longer access the info on the hard drive. Man that BitLocker is amazing, who would of thought putting a completely different drive in the PC wouldn't let you access the same data! ;)

    Jonah Hex
    • "Changes in a PC's Basic Input/Output System" is not necessarily the same as a different drive in the PC. Possible scenario:
      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)

    by Josh Lindenmuth ( 1029922 ) <joshlindenmuth@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @07:27AM (#17111826) Journal
    For larger companies, Vista and Office 2007 will probably be rolled out pretty early, at least to some divisions/groups. Microsoft typically makes upgrade licenses available very cheap (or free) for these organizations, and also uses other incentives/ploys to convince these organizations to upgrade. It's in Microsoft's best interest to get these companies to convert first to start the "trickle down" ball rolling, particularly when it comes to Office 2007.

    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)

      by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @08:01AM (#17112008)
      I think you have it backwards, just based on experience selling software into those sort of companies.

      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.
      • I own a ten person company, and it's exactly how you described it, with us. I'll leave whatever is working for as long as it works, but when it's time to buy a new machine, it's whatever Dell (or whoever) has for cheapest, and I'll take whatever Windows OS it comes with. Right now, if I need a new machine in the next 6 months or so, I *might* try a bit harder to get one with XP, but it's not a big deal. As long as it's Windows, I don't really care what it is. We *never* upgrade OS's, because the oldest

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ccp ( 127147 )
        They are still running Windows 98 on systems that haven't died or been replaced for functional reasons...

        We have one still running Windows 95, you insensitive clod!

        Cheers,
        CC

    • Re:Large vs. small companies (Score:5, Informative)

      by aadvancedGIR ( 959466 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @08:15AM (#17112098)
      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.

  • Let alone large companies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @07:27AM (#17111828) Homepage
    I've finally got a desktop setup that is resonably secure, works with all my applications and as long as I'm sensible about installing dogey software free from Viruses and adware all based on XP. There is nothing that attracts me to Vista though I'm sure I will get a free copy next time I buy a PC and I look forward to using that a coaster
    • I agree. I've got a desktop that works and is secure enough for my use. XP seems fine for now.

      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.
    • Vista though I'm sure I will get a free copy next time I buy a PC
       
      Where did you hear anyone was handing out free copies of Vista with new PCs? China?
  • We have all pentium 4 3ghz with 1 gig of ram 160 gig harddrives an x600 gpus . here at the library all capable of running vista but we will not be upgrading. we have no need to. Any new computers we will get with vista though.
    • What the hell is a library doing with that kind of hardware? I could see having big ram and processors if you are doing very heavy cataloging. But 160 gig hard drives? Most of the big files should be on servers. Fancy GPUs? What for? It's like some kind of Gates grant gone wrong.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Knara ( 9377 )
        I dunno about the CPUs, but I'm pretty sure the rest meet the specs of a fairly standard Dell Optiplex GX-280 from about 2-3 years ago. Not really all that strange.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Knara ( 9377 )

          Sorry, meant GPUs not CPUs. The 280's standard came with the IGP stuff, but the options for graphics on a 280 were:

          • ATI 128MB PCI-Express x16 (Dual VGA or DVI) Radeon X300
          • ATI 64MB PCI-Express x16 (DVI/TV-out) Radeon X300 SE
          • CyberLink PowerDVD 5
          • Intel 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset Family
          • Intel 915G Graphics Controller
  • I work in the IT department of a University. We probably won't start rolling out Vista until we have to, since we have things fairly stable right now and the re-training for some people complicates the issue. We have plans to get some Vista machines in the IT department purely for the reason of support for students and preparation for migration a year or more in the future.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jo42 ( 227475 )
      > We probably won't start rolling out Vista until we have to

      Better be ready by next fall when all the freshmen show up with new laptops running Vista...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Knara ( 9377 )
        Can't speak for the OP, but when I worked for a university, the support was "best effort". You bought your own hardware, then we'll help if we can, but don't feel obligated to go out of our way to fix anything that is a personal machine. University owned hardware we supported, but that's pretty standard.
  • Some posters are asking why it can take years for a rollout to occur so I thought I would share a few observations.

    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
    • Vista may be the last wide-scale operating system deployment ever. It requires so much work to regression test all of the in-house and external applications, that some companies may not bother. Instead, you can just use Virtualization, and run all the old applications on the old operating systems in a compatibility mode.

      With virtualization, the application only needs to get tested on one operating system. No more O/S upgrades for all those specialized applications.

  • 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.

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