90% of IT Professionals Don't Want Vista 619
A survey by King Research has found that Ninety percent of IT professionals have concerns using Vista, with compatibility, stability and cost being their key reasons.
Interestingly, forty four percent of companies surveyed are considering switching to non-Windows operating systems, and nine percent of those have already started moving to their selected alternative.
"The concerns about Vista specified by participants were overwhelmingly related to stability. Stability in general was frequently cited, as well as compatibility with the business software that would need to run on Vista," said Diane Hagglund of King Research.
Well there you have it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that always bothers me with surveys like this is the "have you considered moving to linux/apple" type questions. That's an extremely vague question that can get a 'yes' that can have any meaning for "I've heard a few people talk about linux, I should see what it is" to "we have drawn up a feasibilty report and are waiting for a decision from upper management".
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista Pros: DX10 gaming. More secure?
Vista Cons: Slower, expensive, driver problems, compatibility issues.
I don't see a reason for businesses to switch to Vista, unless you play games at work. Does anyone see any real benefit for a business user to switch to Vista?
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Insightful)
Trifish [slashdot.org] would argue that the security benefits alone are sufficient to justify businesses to upgrade. Personally I would say that Vista may be attractive to new businesses* but not ones with an existing investment in XP or 2000, not because the security is lacking, it is an improvement over XP (especially on x64 hardware) but with all the other issues its just not justifiable.
Vista may become viable as hardware becomes cheaper or if there is a sufficiently large threat to XP that is left unpatched but does not affect Vista.
* (but they should be looking at the alternatives regardless, see what my company tries to do..)
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're not having security problems, then saying, "This is more secure" doesn't cut any slack, and it sure as hell doesn't make it worth it to switch to a completely new system.
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Insightful)
For the home user Vista has many potential attractions, not least of which is that it will likely arrive on a new PC bought, not because vista is available but because a new computer is required. For business the thought of having to replace a huge number of machines, make changes to various other IT systems, solve any incompatibilities, deal with driver issues, retrain staff and then end up with an IT system that may or may not be more secure than the current one (as you said measures have already been taken) and one that will in all honestly probably deliver little or no productivity benefits, is simply repugnant. This is even more so the case since there are other OS's with similar or better levels of security that run very well on older hardware and are considerably cheaper to acquire and potentially cheaper to maintain, sure they have similar issues with regard to training and compatibility, but if you are throwing out everything else anyway, why not go in favour of something that will at least save you money in terms of licensing and hardware requirements (obviously this aproach is not suitable for all, but then those that is is not suitable for Vista as also not suitable.
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Interesting)
As a developer I went through the same thing years ago. I specialized in COM (ActiveX), COM+, and the rest of their DNA stuff (which they had just rolled out); I mainly used Visual C++ and some Visual Basic. Then Microsoft announced
This kind of think, IMHO, is going to happen to the IT people, like it did to so many of us developers back then.
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Do you mean the last one you caught was a year ago, or that your metrics date back a year and show remediation and assesment has been effective?
A lot of the windows exploits have moved* beyond the brain-dead slammer worm that let you know something was hosed. From my experience, many IT shops haven't got the resources, software or experience to stay ahead of the technical level of the malware that is coming down the p
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would a business want to buy additional hardware for this upgrade?
They wouldn't - but that wasn't the issue. The issue was the implication that hardware for Vista is (more) expensive.
They wouldn't need to if they didn't upgrade.
Actually they probably will, once the lease on their existing hardware runs out.
If a business has thousands of desktops from a few years ago, say 1.8Ghz CPU, 512Mb RAM, 40Gb hard disk etc... a bog standard corporate desktop, its not cheap to replace all that kit in one go
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Informative)
If the latest Crysis Demo has anything to say about it, there goes one of your "Pros."
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2209704,00.asp [extremetech.com]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If the latest Crysis Demo has anything to say about it, there goes one of your "Pros."
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2209704,00.asp [extremetech.com]
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Informative)
As another news site [theinquirer.net] points out [theinquirer.net] and microsoft themselves agree, Vista, on a per box basis, uses more memory to boot than a supercomputer...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx [microsoft.com]
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/ccs/sysreqs.mspx [microsoft.com]
Oh and don't look at the disk space requirements, they are truly frightening
When playing games at work is a valid reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well there you have it (Score:5, Insightful)
Or is it just looking at a new games graphics and saying "Oh wow that's all because of DX10"
The rest of the points pose similar questions, especially the one about Linux drivers... ATI or Nvidia? Which Distro? Which Driver version? I've never had any issues with the Nvidia driver myself so your comment seems very incorrect to me.Because playing games at work is top priority for most companies...
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You can stick your head in the sand and refuse to see... but that wont make an ostrich out of you.... just dumber then usual.
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Vista is having some of the pains, looks worse right now, but we'll have to wait and see I think to see if Vista turnes into a ME or not.
"Just like XP flopped...." (Score:3, Interesting)
Anything was better than trying to make ME work. NT4 wasn't really an option because of missing USB drivers, etc. (Microsoft was deliberately using things like lack of USB to help force the upgrade from NT4 to XP).
These days the alternative to Vista (ie. sticking with XP) is a better option, and Microsoft has nothing to leverage (DirectX 10 isn't going to force anybody to upgrade...)
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Ha, when I was in the military we used that to screw with the new data guys, we would go and tell them to install that USB printer on that Windows NT machine over there... and then watch about 80% of them try for about 30 minutes to get it to work.
Makes no sense whatsoever.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Quoting the headline of the
Hardly the same thing. Concern != Don't Want. And you have to be crazy not to be concerned when you deploy a new OS in your enterprise.
TFA even cites a Forrester Research article to back up it's claim (without linking to it). If you want the actual link, here it is. [forrester.com] That study actually claims that one third of businesses will switch to Vista in 2008, which I think is ridiculously optimistic -- but it just goes to show what these studies are worth.
Then there's this gem:
And next, let's consider stability. Stability first of all requires a definition -- it's very unclear what stability the 'study' is referring to. I'll assume for a moment we're talking about Vista not crashing. This is a very valid concern -- any time you're doing an enterprise deployment/upgrade. That's why you test your apps on the hardware you purchase. That's why you standardize on the hardware you have validated -- so you know you are buying machines with h/w, with supported drivers, etc. None of this is new to OS deployments/upgrades in general. I'm not sure what other kinds of stability they might be referring to, but it takes on an all-encompassing vagueness in a very FUDlike manner in TFA. I mean, if you're talking about stability from a support perspective, nothing has changed between now and XP. MS is not about to go belly-up anytime soon, so your vendor is not going to sell you an OS and then dissappear into the ether. Maybe stability refers to the disruption caused by transitioning OSes in the very first place. Understandable. That's why businesses aren't using Vista yet. They don't switch to a new OS just because it was released. They had (or at least should have had) very clear requirements, cost-benefi analysis etc. done when they deployed XP. If they did a good job with that deployment, and it is still serving their needs, they have absolutely no reason to switch. Windows XP will go End of Life in 2014 (i.e. MS will support it until 2014). Until then, if their requirements have not changed in a way that necessitates them to switch, they should not switch -- unless there are some other circumstances (like perhaps needing to deploy new h/w and wanting to sync the OS upgrade with that), or perhaps some cost-benefit analysis shows that they can save money by switching to Vista (just tossing that out as an example -- no need to launch an all-out assault on me).
Comparisons to XP are invalid (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like XP flopped when people were complaining for ages that thousands of applications wouldn't work on it
I was there and this nothing like those days. There is a perfect storm of circumstance conspiring against Vista success. The devaluation of the dollar and crisis in confidence of the valuation of US investment instruments will put many big enterprise upgrades on hold. Based on just the phone calls I get, I see more companies actively seeking alternatives that will run adequately on the commodity hardware they already own.
MSFT contributed to Vista's problems by delivering late, stripping out the value functionality, jacking the prices and confusing the market with their licensing scheme.
Business is good for people writing those decision papers right now.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That is one complaint. Stability is, however, the major complaint. Second is backwards compatibility. Businesses had choices with XP; some businesses use XP Pro but they had Win2K (released 1 year earlier) as an option. With Vista, there is no other choice but going back to XP (released 5 year
Uh...No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless there is a damn compelling reason, I'll stay with what is working and working well until the new thing has been out for a good while...Hell, I know shops that are still migrating to XP and while I think they're behind the times, they're not alone in that.
If you migrate up just because something new is out...That's just foolish. You're adding a fricking ton to your workload, and for no good reason.
Re:Uh...No. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's prettier. But that's about it.
Re:Uh...No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Over the past 6 months, I have gotten a couple of emails about a project manager position and another contract position for a 1000+ desktop rollout planned for 2008 at "the world's largest aircraft company". I think I know who they are referring to. In Redmond's back yard.
The email says
Hence the announcement.... (Score:2, Flamebait)
(Oh, sure, seven'll be ready in the next six months...!)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How many IT professionals... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How many IT professionals... (Score:5, Insightful)
It still has windows general bullshit but considering the age, there's so many great newsgroup / forum and google search* posts for support, most issues are bound t be easy to fix.
* fuck experts exchange, get off the google search results.
Re:How many IT professionals... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How many IT professionals... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: How many IT professionals... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait.
A bit OT, sure... but hasn't that been a rather large argument against adopting Linux? That you had to go to some newsgroup/forum/etc. to get support?
Re:How many IT professionals... (Score:5, Informative)
Things are really quite smooth at work.
We're buying machines under 800$ with monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc and running XP perfectly fine on them.
If we were to consider Vista, the SOE manager wouldn't put Vista on a box with less than dual core and 2gb of ram (and I don't blame him)
XP does all we need it to do right now and it does it well.
Vista would be a support nightmare, I can envision workplaces looking at CTX / Ubuntu setups in the near future definately.
It's possible we would migrate to Vista but I can't imagine it happening for at least 2 or even 3 years, it'll be 4 years old then - terrible.
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In Other News (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, yes, that's what we always say. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end Vista will be inevitable. Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore. (Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line) Believe me, it will happen, eventually. Give it another year or two. I didn't switch to WinXP before SP2 was very mature (Fall 2005). Before I was Win2k all the way, and before that NT 4.0....
Try running NT 4.0 these days... Won't get you very far. That's the future of Windows XP. They are going to drop it like a hot potato.
Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say. (Score:5, Insightful)
It may well be wishful thinking amoungst the Linux faithful but there is a growing impatience with the endless Microsoft upgrade cycle. IT professionals are incresingly saying 'Why upgrade? We gain nothing and lose lots.' I have no major issues with XP, it does everything I want it to, but I will have to upgrade because of all the reasons you state.
So, put yourself in the shoes of a CIO faced with replacing hundreds, or even thousends of PCs because they need to be upgraded to run Vista, and the difficulty of going to the board once again with a request for huge amounts of cash for very little gain, and then maybe Linux starts to look a little better.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I understood that completely....
I have worked for banks (actually, I mostly work for banks), and they are notorious for being slow. So, in late 2004, a grand 3 years after the Windows XP release we were using NT 4.0 SP-5 on the desktop. On new Dell machines, nevertheless. While in a banking setup it wasn't important, there were no drivers for the soundcards and I believe the used a Matrox model they installed themselves that was still supported on NT 4.0 or somesuch thing.
I'm just stating that if
Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yes, people are equally furious about 1) Microsoft continuously introducing new versions and 2) Microsoft not providing the features they want and need.
And whats more its the same people and they don't use Windows anyway.
Vista runs just fine. I have been running it since May and not had any problems apart from a couple that are pretty squarely third party issues. Vista is fast and slick on my hardware.
Admittedly I would probably not recommend a Vista upgrade but thats mostly because the cost of the Vista upgrade is so close to the cost of a new machine anyway. I have two vista machines and three XP machines in the house. One of those is a three year old Vaio that is dropping to pieces anyway. Another is a Dell box I paid $500 for including the monitor and the other is the machine I use for surfing while I am working out on the treadmill.
Why pay $160 to upgrade when the machines are 2 years old and I can have a whole new machine thats much faster for $500? I certainly would not consider buying a new XP machine though.
The industry does not want Vista whine is wishful thinking. Many companies took two years or more to roll out XP. If you have a hundred or so users you would be a fool not to adopt a wait and see approach. But that does not say anything about the quality of the product.
Vista has higher hardware requirements than past versions. That does not make them unreasonable requirements. But most IT depts want to support a single version of the O/S so that means that they can't do the upgrade till they can afford to end-of-life the legacy machines that don't support the new version.
Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say. (Score:4, Interesting)
A migration from XP to Vista will bring with it a myriad of problems, hosts of issues, hours and hours of work...And that is the tip of the iceberg of what it would take to migrate their userbase from XP to Linux.
I've been involved in a good half-dozen attempts to move an all windows shop to an all Linux environment, and it always comes down to the same stuff. You may pry them off windows, but you won't pry them off their windows software, so either you have to put your trust in WINE (pause for laughter) or you have to invest heavily in windows terminal services so that you can run all the windows apps they need in a terminal session on their linux machines. Doing that will cause whole new levels of stress on your network, and it also throws up some new point of failure issues.
On top of all the technical crap, you're going to have massive training issues, and a lot of user resistance from people who want to be able to install stupid little desktop apps. Most of the IT staff won't be happy with you, because generally most of the staff won't be linux guys.
Even if you get it all running (and every time I've ever done one of these, we got it running, and well), you're still going to get resistance. It stays ugly for long periods of time...I've seen people roll back after two years, writing off a quarter million dollar system as a bad deal.
Until we get native software, it's going to be the deal-breaker. Selling the terminal services stuff to people doesn't fly all that well.
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Very, very unlikely. The makers of drivers and"important programs" want to sell their stuff. Why on earth should the target a small market instead of a large one? The only Vista-only software I am aware of today is games paid for by MS to be Vista-only.
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In the end Vista will be inevitable. Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore. (Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line) Believe me, it will happen, eventually. Give it another year or two. I didn't switch to WinXP before SP2 was very mature (Fall 2005). Before I was Win2k all the way, and before that
Yet something seems different this time (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, those are some of the exact reasons Vista hasn't gained the traction in enterprise environments that MS would like:
* There is hardware out there with drivers not available anymore except for WinXP or earlier, because it is just a bit too old for MS or the vendors to care (in the latter case, it is often the issue of being economically unjustifiable to sup
Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say. (Score:4, Interesting)
I (and I'm sure many others) feel that Windows 2000 was the best operating system Microsoft has designed to date.
Oh, I'm one of those. Microsoft peaked with Win2k, but are you sure you get all security updates? Is IE7 available for your system. Does Office 2007 work for you?
As you read in my post, I switched to XP very late. Why did I switch? There is exactly one feature that is so useful in a home setting, that I still wonder why it hasn't been backported to Win2k. For me the "killer feature" was "fast user switching".
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I managed to trim XP down to a reasonable 150MB (on CD) and 350MB (installed - minus the pagefile) using nlite and am back to Win2K levels of performance (higher even!
Nothing new. (Score:5, Insightful)
Articles like this don't offer too much insight. IT workers are resistant to change... BIG surprise there.
Re:Nothing new. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing new. (Score:5, Interesting)
What I don't remember about XP, either, was mass outcry about XP-only machines and vendors offering downgrade options. I don't remember that one bit.
No, this isn't like the release of XP at all.
I remember when I had 98 and was more or less forced to upgrade (try running 98 on 2Ghz+ hardware). I was EXTREMELY hesitant to upgrade, I mean, 98 was good, right? Games didn't work right, right? DOS stuff? It took me about 5 minutes to love 2k and I never looked back to 98. Trying out Vista, though, for the first time last week (and on the same machine I had tried to run 98 on years ago), the same thing certainly didn't happen. I was never so happy to reboot back into Gentoo before.
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And I think that this is killing them. In attempting to make Vista *NEW* and *REQUIRED* and *DIFFERENT*, they broke a number of things, introduced a bunch of annoyances - killing any desire many people have for upgrading... DRM is only one of the annoyances - why would you set up an OS to work *worse* than its predecessor?
Sure, it's prettier - but there are still lots of peop
Re:Nothing new. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, the alternative is an OS that rivals Vista in the amount of hype it's gotten and at a bare minimum at least has support for MS Office and Adobe CS products (and has a couple different ways to run your XP/Vista programs if you really need one or two of them).
And, of course, Linux has come a long way as well - in 2001 it definitely was not user-friendly enough to be seen as a viable alternative for a lot of companies. Now not only has it improved its interface in a lot of ways, it has a much better software selection - a lot of office drones can get by just fine on OO.o instead of Office, people are using Firefox instead of IE even in windows, etc.
Everyone keeps saying "the same thing happened with XP" - but it's a different world now than it was when SP came out. No, I don't think Vista is going to be a MS-crushing flop. But when everything shakes out a couple years down the road, I think that the market share figures will definitely look a little different, even if MS still has a majority share.
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Today, we have OpenOffice if you don't like the conventional Office 2007. We have many releases of Linux and even BSD that look pretty nice on a desktop. And if you don't want a bloated OS, you can pare this thing down to however little you can manage with.
That's huge. No CIO should ignore it this time. They may still head for Vista. But more and mo
Negotiating tactic (Score:2)
Re:win98 to XP (Score:2)
I think the difference was most company's still had 98, so they were supporting 2-3 different OS's.
So you replace your 95/98 desktop machines with XP, because thats what PC's come with. Then once you figured out XP and it became stable you could go to a single operating system for all your windows boxes, including servers.
Today, most companys are only running XP. So what does Vista offer, as long as a few PC venders still
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Any significant IT department will either order systems pre-imaged to their requirements (Dell offer such a service), or re-image systems with their own company-specific image before they're sent out.
The big killer has always been driver support. Once the likes of HP, Lenovo and Dell are shipping PCs with significantly better driver support in Vista than in XP, then we shall see more adoption of Vista.
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And, btw, Vista does not have a huge learning curve - I picked it up in an afternoon, and I'm still searching for a reason to go back to XP. You can even make it run practically identical to X
More legacy than stability (Score:5, Insightful)
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And just what those applications be, I can honestly say that I've not had a single application fail to run in Vista, and I have a fairly extensive collection installed.
Different things (Score:5, Insightful)
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I hate to re-post this but,.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Vista's flaw isn't it's lack of a service pack it's the complete lack of THOUGHT in the design of the operating system.
The user interface is quite simply, messy - it's appalling, frustrating, confusing and slow.
Re-post below, sorry but damnit if it's not on topic and fitting (mind the language, I was pissed off when I wrote it)
(I wonder if Microsoft chumps read this site, I can post this all I want but how do I get these darn issues addressed, where do I post this to tell these idiots to wake the hell up?)
Anyhow, here goes..
First off, this post and my subsequent replies, my "general whinge with the OS"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=304745&cid=20695969 [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org]
Then in a little bit more detail
(crosspost of a post I made on a forum not more than 24 hours ago, I finally documented precisely why Vista Explorer shits me to tears)
Warning: Bad language ahead.
Why does Windows Vista insist on a startup sound, despite me disabling all sounds, they are turned off but it does one at startup, I like quiet and what if I don't want to wake people up?
I've been meaning to make this post for a while, I may have railed on Vista for performance problems, specifically in Crysis, you do need to give a new operating system a 'pass' for a while, let it settle in (it's nearly been a year though!!!)
My beef still sits with Windows Explorer, something I use daily, a lot at work and home, I need it clean, simple and easy to get data into my face as quick as possible so I can react as quickly as possible (yes, I sorry to big note but I am, *that* quick on the keyboard and when working with files)
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh01.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Apply to all folders won't let me save the options for "Computer" (My Computer) or Desktop, this is annoying.
also, fuck the breadcrumbs bar, in the ASSSSS
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh02.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
That motherfucker 'task pane' which is taking space up from my damn explorer view.
Sure, I found some website suggesting I shrink the size of it (yay) but I can still accidentally click the bastard, plus it still looks messy.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh03.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Mofo! I accidentally clicked it, see explanation of why it eats babies in the JPG itself.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy01.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Those little box pluses, I like them, why take them away? It's confusing and slowing down the amount of data I can take in per 'scene' I need info and you're witholding it, just so you can pretend you're neater than you actually are.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy02.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Ahh my boxes are back, this is good, also more cluttered shit.
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf01.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
You call this a save as dialogue box?
I hit shift tab twice (yes, I do often, try it people) to navigate quickly to where I normally would on XP.
I slap backspace like 10 times fast, this should ensure I'm at desktop, almost instantly (shift tab x2 and backspace x10 takes me 1 second)
Does it work? no, of course it doesn't you breadcrumb whores.
soooo I hit browse
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf02.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com] oh oh
Hot jesus, make the fucking hurting stop!
This is one of the best reasons WHY I can't deal, look at it
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My 5 Cents Comments (Score:4, Insightful)
Designing GUIs is difficult because you don't really know what it should look like until someone else tries to use it. Every person will use your GUI a bit differently and those will want you to adjust your GUI your GUI accordingly (and often be right at that). And (and this is the most problematic part) even persons who don't use your GUI will still have an oppinion how the GUI should look like and work, according their own logic and might demand that you change it (bosses and such). That is why I have huge respects to the guys over at apple. Oh and I don't get me wrong. I don't search any excuses for MS, after so many years they still manage to screw up on the usability side. I just want to give you another perspective as to why such might crap happens at MS. My guess goes towards bad bosses.
The other thing I wanted to say is, that I think your "DISK1C___GAMES PORN___(E)" is pretty kinky and I bow before you beeing so straight forward and not obfuscating it after taking screenshots of it
Cheers
Herbiestone
Re: (Score:2)
If you work in IT and can't appreciate a good motherfucker now and then, (Especially as a Windows user) you're a sheltered man.
Re:I hate to re-post this but,.... (Score:4, Funny)
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(P.S that drive holds re-direct my documents, games, cd images for said games, mp3's, a 'temp' directory AND porn)
Taking numbers out of context? bad survey? (Score:2)
90% of IT professionals doesn't want anything NEW (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:90% of IT professionals doesn't want anything N (Score:2)
I think you missed the part where it said the companies were currently running XP.
Re:90% of IT professionals doesn't want anything N (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:90% of IT professionals doesn't want anything N (Score:2)
Re:90% of IT professionals doesn't want anything N (Score:2)
Yes, but what does "considering" mean? (Score:5, Informative)
44% are considering moving to another operating system. That's so broad as to be almost useless. "Considering" could mean:
Re:Yes, but what does "considering" mean? (Score:5, Informative)
"Clearly many companies are serious about this alternative, with 9% of those saying they have considered non-Windows operating systems already in the process of switching and a further 25% expecting to switch within the next year," the report "Windows Vista Adoption and Alternatives" reads.
So about a third of that 44% have at least made it past your first two stages, and some of those are in the final stage.
MS blunder (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read my journal, you'll see that my latest post is an expansion of my sig. You see, Microsoft's motto used to be "Where do you want to go today?" If that were still the case today, I think it would be a multiple choice question, and the choices would be:
The ironic thing is that all of these alternative OSes are UNIX-based or UNIX-like.
Back to my sig and journal, I haven't used Windows on my own computers for a number of years now, but I do administer a number of XP machines for my employer. This is soon to change as we are seriously considering a move to the Mac platform for all of this company's computers, and for the two must-have Windows-only applications that we use on only two of our machines, we will install VMware and run XP in a virtual machine. We have been testing this configuration for a number of months now and it is rock solid. Not only that, but these two apps are major engineering applications with four and five digit price tags, and although the versions we use are 7 years old, they do the job we need them to do and no upgrade is necessary, so it will be unnecessary for us to switch to Vista any time soon.
We did evaluate Vista when it first came out. The evaluation was a short one because we immediately recognized that MS made a big blunder with Vista. To begin with, the installer took forever to load, and then gleefully told us, in shiny letters on a colorful background, how Windows Vista saves you time, as if to say that if the Installer works this slowly, wait 'till you see the operating system! Once the system was up and running, it became quite apparent that it was a joke. We realized that if we were to embrace Vista, it would mean replacing all of our computers, training most of the employees who use them due to the interface's heavy changes, and have many issues with speed, compatibility, and integration. In short, the cost would be horrendous, and at the end of the day, we couldn't find any justification for this expense, even if we tried.
That is the bottom line. Tremendous cost; no benefit. This is Microsoft's blunder. They simply can't keep forcing upgrades because XP does everything that most businesses need from an operating system, and the course MS should have taken is one of incremental improvements. Had they spent the last five years fixing bugs, cleaning up code, optimizing the bottlenecks of the system, tightening up security, and providing new features slowly and incrementally, they would probably have Windows XP with instant search and a database file system working by now. The only additional misfeature that Vista provides is its incredibly ugly, slow, and resource hogging interface, and we want no part of that. In fact, we run all our XP machines without the Luna interface because we think that's ugly as well.
Vista is MS's fastest product launch ever (Score:2, Interesting)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20070517/ai_n19115496 [findarticles.com]
And MS reported a 27% surge in revenue on strong Vista sales:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2207551,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000610 [eweek.com]
It's really only on Slashdot that it's a failure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I think back, wasn't that because people were redeeming all their Vista vouchers that they accumulated the past four months from OEM systems? Remember, the whole "Free Vista upgrade!" deal?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course more computers get sold nowadays, too. Adjusted figures would make more sense.
Odd Statistics (Score:2)
28 + 18 + 9 = 55. However, 44% was the claimed number considering alternatives (that 4% doesn't count). Perhaps each was allowed to cite multiple choices?
Vista isn't Stable? (Score:5, Informative)
In our testing, Vista has been perfectly stable. Our only complaint is that 3rd party software hasn't been updated to work with it yet (IE: be it applications such as our Audit software, or Web-based SSL VPN from Cisco ).
Some users bitched about the new GUI, but these are the same users that complained about XP's different start menu and forced 2000-class on everyone for a while.
We will happily move to Vista once the 3rd party apps work with it. Blaming Vista because 3rd party apps don't work with it makes as about as much sense as blaming Mac or *nix because, CCH didn't write a tax app for them.
Vista killed a lot of backward compatibility by making things more secure. Although their implementation of this security leaves a lot to be desired (accept/deny). We have no doubt that the 3rd party vendors will eventually update their apps accordingly.
Stability issue would definitely cause us to push our deployment schedule back, however right now we are only waiting on the vendors to update their software (all hardware works fine so far).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Vista isn't Stable? (Score:2)
Only between the keyboard and computer (Score:3, Insightful)
Installing Vista ? (Score:3, Funny)
If I were an eccentric billionaire... (Score:4, Funny)
"Heterogeneous systems" issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Right... exactly the same set of challenges faced by anyone trying to manage more than one version of Windows.
I've always thought that a good measure of the quality of a software ecosystem is its ability to tolerate version skew between components that would be reasonably expected to be forward-compatible. Conversely, if an ecosystem only works smoothly when everything is at exactly the right version and patch level... particularly when the right version is not the latest version, it's an indication of a combination of poor engineering and poor management.
It was a revelation to me when, circa 1991, I heard software developers in a Fortune 500 company use the word "port" to describe what they needed to do to transition software from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1.
This sort of situation is tolerated by Microsoft and other large dominant companies (including Apple, these days, within its own fiefdom of dominance) and by their customers, up to a point.
To some degree it's a win-win scenario. A homogenous environment reduces everyone's support costs, provides a smoother user experience, and allows sloppy engineering to go tolerated and unpunished. It's zero-sum with regard to the cost of keeping the whole company updated, though: that costs the customer and mostly benefits the vendor. Still, a big customer will tolerate that cost, because there's some benefit, in terms of smoother operation. True, better engineering would allow heterogenous versions to interoperate smoothly, so in theory one could have the benefit without the cost, but this is the real world, and many customers may not like the upgrade treadmill but nevertheless see as being the best option.
But there's a breaking point, and it comes if it is not really practical for the customer to go to a homogeneous system.
Clearly it's not practical for a big company to go with homogenous Windows Vista yet.
Microsoft had better have come up with something truly commendable in Vista SP1.
The disconnect between developers...and everyone! (Score:3, Insightful)
"enough features" threshold (Score:2)
What's to discuss? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. XP is fine -- a remarkable achievement, actually -- a Microsoft operating system that's finally releatively stable. Well, they've had a few years to get it right. And getting an OS right is really, really tough.
2. Vista requires top of the line hardware to run decently -- dual core processors and 2G RAM. We had the exact same discussion over ten years ago when Windows 95 came out -- Microsoft swore it would run fine in 4M memory, and it never did -- 8M was better, and 12M was decent.
3. Vista is still not stable -- it is, after all, a 1.0 release. Geeks consider anything 1.0 from Microsoft a bit dodgy.
4. All current applications run fine on Windows XP, but may or may not run under Vista. No surprise there.
5. A recent article said that XP was still outselling Vista three to one on new system installs. It's not a tough choice: do you want the stable option that runs more quickly and is more compatible, or would you prefer the unstable option that runs more slowly and is less compatible? Hmmm. But the new one has such pretty pictures! Shiny! Shiny!
Sorry. Got carried away for a moment there.
I think Microsoft's suits need to just suck it up and keep selling Vista quietly, and give the engineers time to get the code right. The hardware will catch up to Vista, and the engineers will get the bugs sorted out. In a couple of years XP will be old hat.
I just wish they'd been able to get more of the cool stuff like WinFS into the latest version of Windows. It seems that this version is just new wrinkles in the sheet metal, and nothing much else. Sigh.
Microsoft is like an ex-wife (Score:5, Interesting)
But then buying Apple products is the same except it starts with a new house and works it's way back to the dress, car, and kitchen appliances which can only come from the same company that built the house.
I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.
The only free choice comes when you use commodity hardware with a Linux or Free/Open/Net BSD OS. Having a geek staff to build and maintain these are no more expensive than buying into the 'Who you gonna sue when it goes bad' thinking so it has to be corporate buys only. When is the last time anyone sued Microsoft successfully for causing millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity due to security flaws and buggy productivity tools?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.
Apple does tie their hardware and OS and it is a huge drawback to using their products. Of course if they didn't do it, they'd go out of business because they'd be directly competing with MS in the OS space, which given MS's ability to illegally leverage their monopoly is a losing proposition, regardless of the relative quality of the products. That said, aside from that one tie in, Apple doesn't do a lot to tie other products to their OS or computers. They work with standard compliant devices, connectors
So I Was a Vista Skeptic... (Score:3, Insightful)
When it came time for me to get a new laptop, I desperately wanted to get one with XP, an operating system that has mostly had the major issues worked out of it, and that I knew well inside and out. But my business partner made the good point that, as IT Consultants, we were going to have to support it, so we should know it, whither or not we really like it. And (of course) the best way to get to know an OS is to live with it.
So I've been running Vista for about a week so far, with heavy use both plugged in and on battery, and I have to say this (in bold in italics so you get the idea of how surprising this was to me... ) I'm pretty impressed with Vista. YES, I know i has problems, some of which are VERY aggrivating. It shows as using a lot of ram, and it does tend to bother one overly much while installing software and doing other system tasks. BUT- for the avarage user, these warnings will help to make it harder for malware vendors to install their junk software, for even if the spyware/adware uses an IE exploit to enter the system, if they are trying to hide behind the vague shell of being valid software their install will cause a warning to pop up for the user. While this doesn't stop a user for still allowing it, it DOES make them aware of the problem- an improvement. to be sure.
I also have noted that yes, Vista DOES look a lot like Windows XP professional in drag. The menus are confusing... but only for someone used to 98/2k/XP. Oh, and you can make Vista behave and look quite a bit like XP, as well. Personally I've left the pretty stuff on- it's not too bad looking, and hell, if Apple can get away with a pretty UI, why not Microsoft?
Vista has it's share of problems, but overall I'd say that it will be an improvement over XP- once some of the worst issues are taken care of.
Personally, I've not had any software compatibility issues yet, and have installed old versions of Winamp, CDex, and even Total Annhiliation on the system with nary an issue.
I'm NOT saying that it's perfect, nor that it's ready for a large-scale enterprise roll-out. Realistically speaking, XP is a better platform anyhow- hell, most corporate networks could still be using terminals for much of their work! But it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft.
Please note that not only did I post this from my work OSx machine, I'm also in charge of maintaining 200+ desktops with OSs ranging from Win98SE to OS9 and a couple variants of linux. So i'm not a total OS/UI noob
Maybe overhyped but... (Score:5, Interesting)
We chose XP. It didn't even take a second's thought - we all just mutually agreed Vista wouldn't be worth the effort. We did do a small viability test to see what we'd been given for free and put it on a high-end machine etc. to test it. We couldn't find a single compelling reason to use it over XP and yet we found lots of reasons against - starting with "we don't know what it'll do, whether it'll run everything we need or what problems it will cause us - even after testing it" and going through to "it slows the machines down".
There was literally nothing. We had a network running only a handful of servers, transition would have been effortless because this was before we'd started imaging the machines for the next term and we just all agreed not to. T'aint broke, don't fix it. XP t'aint broke - and the parts that ARE broke weren't fixed in Vista. SP3 is around the corner. SP2 is good enough for our purposes. Vista didn't solve any problems that we had but would have introduced whole new problems that we wouldn't have had - starting with user-retraining - even in Classic settings, it works differently.
Our servers were mainly managed by batch scripts (yes, not even VB scripts) and a common piece of school computer management software. We didn't even bother to look up if they would work with Vista - the OS just didn't even get that far in our estimations. Plus, on the "non-kids" part of the school, we had just plain AD and logon script management. We could easily do Vista on one side, XP on another as they are physically seperate and don't need to be compatible. We didn't bother.
Where were the advantages? Any established network already has stuff in place which makes that all the stuff that Vista touts as features useless - they are all either permanently turned off or people use a better non-Microsoft replacment. For example, we turned all our XP machines to "classic" settings because it meant that we could keep another two "generations" (i.e. a full annual/termly purchase) of computers running at the same settings as the rest of the network at a reasonable pace. Without "classic" we would have had to upgrade or scrap two generations of machines because they wouldn't have been usable. With Vista, we were looking at moving on an extra two generations of PC's minimum - it was too expensive, even in "classic" mode. And to run it "as intended", we were looking closer to four generations.
There wasn't anything new to manage. Vista behaved the same under the management of a Server 2003 server as XP did. It was, to all intents and purposes, a heavier XP. There wasn't anything for the users, especially not after you bring it in line with XP-era performance. Maybe they could have used a handful of features at home but in a business you didn't want half of what it was trying to do.
Maybe if they'd released the next Windows Server at the same time - so that they worked and could be purchased, spec'ced, learned, managed and upgraded in tandem - it would be more of an enticement. As it is it's just a slow XP. With less drivers. And more nuisances.
When people that get Vista licenses literally FOR FREE with the way they purchase licenses and months later they still haven't done more than "curiosity" testing and still don't use your product, you have a problem. We don't get any expressions of surprise or attempts to push Vista when we order PC's in bulk and categorically specify "XP Pro pre-installed, drivers & licenses please, no Vista" on the
Microsoft has opened a Pandora's Box. (Score:4, Insightful)
My Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so much concerned about incompatibility, instability or user-unfriendliness.
The license would be expensive and I'd have to upgrade 100 machines which are all comfortably running XP. XP works for everybody. Nobody has any applications which require Vista. So there's really no motivation to buy it.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Sadly, once security updates cease, a lot of those people in that 90% will have no choice but to reconsider the switch.
Becoming mainstream? (Score:3, Funny)