Businesses warned against skipping Vista

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

Of course there's a good reason to switch to Vista! I mean, Microsoft would love your money. :p lol.

My school just switched to XP this year. I'm pretty sure alot of them were still 98 last year :|

[sundayx Veteran]

I like the 'switch to Linux, Mac'

They are business, Mac would be too expensive and i for one if i was running a business wouldn't want to mess around with Linux.

Not necessarily, it could mean less maintenance cost (I'm not exactly sure the figuers) and a) Apple offer huge corporate discounts? b) Linux have a variety of free platforms

[Evolution]

While Linux may be free I'm sure the maintenance costs would go up pretty quickly upon a switch. I think this will become a real issue if we don't see businesses switching over in a year thanks to SP1.

Currently most businesses wouldn't switch over to a mac since many of the applications they depend on are written exclusively for the PC.... and finding alternative that provide all of the same features, and easy migration would be difficult.

BTW many of the features of Vista are extremely useful.... particularly the security side and cannot be mitigated by simply using an antivirus and firewall program. i.e. standard users is a huge change for the Windows OS that will help a lot... regardless.

[markwolfe Veteran]

...

BTW many of the features of Vista are extremely useful.... particularly the security side and cannot be mitigated by simply using an antivirus and firewall program. i.e. standard users is a huge change for the Windows OS that will help a lot... regardless.

Once again, security is not a product. If it was, the solution to everyone's problems years ago would have been OpenBSD.

What you describe (not running as administrator by default) is an example of a security policy not a product feature. Thank god Microsoft has caught up to the unix (and clones) world^* by introducing true account separation with XP and run-as-user as a default with Vista. But the whole "don't run as admin/root" is a policy that is set up by the IT department in business, or by the home administrator at home (most non-techies just run with the way Dell provided the computer).

"Standard users is a huge change" blah, blah, blah. It already exists in what many business use today: Win2000 and WinXP.

* _{DISCLAIMER / POINT OF BALANCE: And Linux is catching up to to the Windows world just now in some respects, as Ubuntu only recently added a graphics "safe mode"}

[zivan56]

Most places I have been to (accounting/tax/financial planning companies) still use Windows 2000. In fact, some of their software doesn't even work properly in XP. Some companies making the software for them are switching to Java...so they wont have to upgrade for a long time (or could switch to another OS).

[Paixao]

Our portuguese ATM network still uses nt4 :D

[devHead]

I thought security and viruses was a huge deal to businesses.... which Vista fixes.... I guess they don't care about that anymore :/ Not to mention policies in Vista are far more granular allowing Admins to create better policies and distribute them easily.

You are right, Evolution, but you gotta remember something else about companies and the software they use and feel 'suits their needs'. The No. 1 database application in the world used today by companies is...tada Microsoft Excel!! No, not Access, which is a database application, Excel, which is a spreadsheet app. But hey, the tables on spreadsheets look a lot like Access database tables, so why not use Excel instead, since it seems like it's easier to use.

I have worked with guys that used tables in Microsoft Word for their databases. So, I don't think you can argue that since many companies aren't going to migrate to Vista, and they're going to stick with XP or 2000 is because they have a real grip on what's best all around.

And Vista, which is based on WinXP/Server 2003 code will never be as bad as what Windows ME was.

[Mike Frett]

Shoot, I know companies that run win 3.1 to run the steel plant. As long as none of these computers are hooked up to the internet, it shouldn't be an issue what OS you run.

[Miuku.]

While Linux may be free I'm sure the maintenance costs would go up pretty quickly upon a switch. I think this will become a real issue if we don't see businesses switching over in a year thanks to SP1.

Having done a full company migration in the past I can tell you exactly the opposite - not only did license fees go down (or rather apart from the support agreement they disappeared), also maintenance costs dropped mainly due to the fact that we were now able to transparently do remote management which was clunky at best on Windows even with dedicated tools for it.

Drivers and hardware support was not an issue because much of the existing hardware "worked out of the box" (being pretty standard grey boxes with most of the hardware integrated or very simple) and the next batch of hardware that was bought was bought with "Linux in mind" - printers and others were already handled by HP distributed printing systems so they weren't an issue either.

Patch management was simplified tenfold (albeit Microsoft has tried to patch that up with the (W)SUS line of products, it's still a bit of a mess) and we were able to roll out "diskless" workstations in places where they were suitable.

I can tell you they've been saving mucho cashola in the past few years after the initial migration.

The "Linux costs a lot more" is a myth that's being spread by businesses who either do not have the ability to do the transition or those who have ulterior motives. As long as you have an IT department that has the necessary knowledge and skills it's not an issue to support a whole company transition.

Of course a lot of people are scared senseless that their "MCSE" certifications are utterly useless when they have to deal with an operating system they have no knowledge of - that's where those who actually are IT professionals shine, not the certificate kids that plague the current IT landscape.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

Or go the Apple way.

Why? React OS will have NTFS support by then. Ubuntu and Linux will be far advanced. There will be far more options.

I'm not sure how either comment is relevant to the discussion or makes any logical sense. Maybe I'm missing something?

The companies aren't making the migration because they don't feel it is needed. That means they feel like things work fine just as they are and they don't need to invest the money to do a migration. If they were to move to a different platform wouldn't they then need to incur the same costs as moving to a new OS? If they moved to Apple they have to acquire all new hardware at a cost that is significantly higher than non-Apple branded hardware. If they moved to Linux they have to invest quite an amount of money into making sure they can smoothly make the transition then make it.

Either one of those would make sense if they saw a need to upgrade, but weren't sure Windows offered them the lowest TCO over the planned lifetime of their investment. Otherwise, they would be in the same box deciding to go to Vista or any other platform...

[CelticWhisper]

Like I posted in the first skipping-Vista thread, my company is still on DOS on a lot of our machines. We have no plans to actively embrace or reject Vista at this point, so whatever happens happens. However, Linux is more viable than many give it credit for and it's not far-fetched at all for a company to switch to Linux desktops. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean that it can't. A lot of organizations are using Linux servers, so adding another one to control user accounts and directory services wouldn't be hard. Migrate the users' files over from the NT server and network access will be seamless for users. Then it's really just a matter of finding identical or near-identical application software for the end-user desktops. Most office workers learn what they need to do on an application basis more than on an OS/system/concept/philosophy basis. "Click here, here, and there to send Jim the weekly price reports" is heard far more frequently around my office than "I want software that relies on qt instead of gtk." Not directly analogous, I know, but you get the idea.

Alternatively, give them Gutsy with Compiz Fusion and a Vista theme, rename the Applications menu to "Start," and just say "We upgraded you to Vista." (No, not really.)

[.Kompressor]

pfft skip it and wait for the next windows.

2000 still runs flawlessly on alot of our workstations at the office.

[Boeing 787]

pfft skip it and wait for the next windows.

2000 still runs flawlessly on alot of our workstations at the office.

You say that with confidence that Windows 7 will be any better then Vista.

They should push Windows 7 off to 2014 and fix Vista first. If they work really hard maybe by 2010 we could have a Windows Vista R2 release that would make us all forget R1.

[Linkinfamous]

pfft skip it and wait for the next windows.

2000 still runs flawlessly on alot of our workstations at the office.

Yes, but the differences between 2000 and XP are mostly trivial. The shift in underlying technologies from XP to Vista, however, was huge, and skipping it will likely cause problems when down the road, trying to make an even larger jump from 2000 to 7, or XP to 7.

[somethingthatrhymes]

But Gartner research vice president Michael Silver has warned that the next version of Windows — code-named "Windows 7" — may also suffer from the delays that dogged Vista and be just as difficult to adopt.

Haha, nice message: "The next version of Windows will likely be just as bad to adopt as Vista, so you might as well go to Vista".

Especially with small companies, it's a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" deal. As other people have said, a lot are still on 2000. Although my boss (small company) seems to have the opposite approach, he gets all the new things as soon as they come out, despite the (IMO) lack of need - we upgraded from Office 2003 to 2007, and I have used it maybe 3 times this year, and have never used any of the new features.

EDIT:

You are right, Evolution, but you gotta remember something else about companies and the software they use and feel 'suits their needs'. The No. 1 database application in the world used today by companies is...tada Microsoft Excel!!

That doesn't sound like a very scientific statistic, but I would not be surprised at all if that were true, having experienced similar circumstances firsthand. Unfortunately, (but very obviously) this causes lots of problems down the road as the "database" gets bigger and more features are added.

EDIT:

* _{DISCLAIMER / POINT OF BALANCE: And Linux is catching up to to the Windows world just now in some respects, as Ubuntu only recently added a graphics "safe mode"}

Wouldn't this just be a separate xorg.conf, in which case the capability was always there, but no distro thought to implement it?

Edited December 11, 2007 by somethingthatrhymes

[markwolfe Veteran]

Wouldn't this just be a separate xorg.conf, in which case the capability was always there, but no distro thought to implement it?

Exactly. In the past, most people who used Linux were comfortable enough (or expected to be comfortable enough) with Linux to do that sort of recovery/repair from runlevel 3. With the increase in Linux take-up by less-experienced users, there is a growing need for Linux to handle some of these things automatically for users.

[Rohdekill]

The article is about how vendors will stop supporting Windows XP. In 2010 there may not be official support for the software a business needs to run on Windows XP because the vendor has moved on to Vista and the vendor may not be ready for Windows 7.

Some software vendors have warned us that they will drop all support for both Windows XP and 32 bit. We will need Vista 64 to get official support for our workstations. Of course a quad core with 8 Gigs of memory is going to need a 64 bit OS anyways.

Most of the vendors I have encountered take years to develop their product to run on the newest OS...in fact, as of six months ago, we encountered 4 that are still developing their XP version.