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Most enterprises have resolved to skip Windows Vista altogether. With Vista on its way out, Microsoft would be hoping for enterprises to upgrade to Windows 7 at the first given opportunity. However, Microsoft will have to wait as that is exactly what most enterprises plan on doing. A large majority of enterprises have decided against upgrading next year, according to a survey conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research.
Dimensional Research took the opinion of 1,100 IT professionals. More than 83 percent of those surveyed have no plans of upgrading next year. The ongoing recession and doubts over software compatibility are the main reasons why most businesses want to play the wait-and-watch game.
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Denis63
April 15, 2009 at 1:12pm
I work for a company with over 10,000 employees and probably somewhere around 12,000 computers and not one of them has Vista. some stil have ME, 2000, and one has 98 (that i know of) but mostly we all use XP pro, SP3. Brand new HP Workstation laptops, and brand new Dell towers (ewww...) all get formatted with XP the second they leave the box!
-Denis
AntiHero
April 15, 2009 at 8:40am
If you ran an IT department...would you roll out a brand new os in an environment that remains as stable as it is because of reliability? Where the company is making money from productivity? Adding a new OS means people need the time to learn it, get comfortable with it, and find the things they are used to on XP. Since it's not a necessity right now, they won't. My company has people running vista now, but it wasn't until November that a couple people changed over, as of now, 3 or 4 of the 10 of us are still on XP. I use vista on my laptop, but XP on my desktop. When some of us switched to vista, we had some small problems, which is why the rest of us aren't on it, even though the software problems have been fixed, we still don't bother changing over. If someone came to me and said "you're getting a vista machine to replace the xp one today" i would be ok with it, no complaints because i know both, however most people have XP at home, and in most cases for older people, learned on XP or 98, vista is too big a change for them, 7 will be just as troublesome. Don't get me wrong, i'm all for change, however 7 only totes some better system resource handling as vista, and a flashy GUI over XP's dull (after 8 years) GUI. The thing about it i've noticed is, the challenges between 64 and 32 bit. I've had my fair share of 64 bit problems, wishing i was on 32, and since microsoft (and most laptop companies) are phasingout 32 bit. Also it is costly to upgrade everyones pc, which is thekey factor in this, because a new pc at about 500 bucks per user, and a new license for windows at about 200 bucks, is 700 per person, 10 people and you've got 7,000 dollars missing, just as a rough example.
I don't like Microsoft, I associate with it.
Trooper_One
April 15, 2009 at 7:00am
Upgrading an OS is not an easy or cheap task. Not only does a company have to deal with the cost of new licenses and compatibility issues, there's the cost of post-upgrade and future maintenance. Our company managed to upgrade all managers' laptops (not cheap) but we had some networking (actually, still do) with remote log-in, security, and MIS issues that are still being dealt with.
They didn't upgrade my machine (hardware and OS wise) and luckily, it still works fine under XP Pro. ^_^
scabbynacker
April 15, 2009 at 6:43am
I'm curious how you maintain an application for which you don't have the source code.
At any rate, there are always more reasons not to upgrade than to upgrade an operating system. Until an OS vendor can figure out how to add a whole lot of value to their OS inside a generation, companies will continue holding off on upgrading as long as possible. A fancier GUI isn't impressive to anyone's bottom line.
Taz0
April 16, 2009 at 12:10pm
"A fancier GUI isn't impressive to anyone's bottom line."
Truer words have never been spoken. And this doesn't apply only to operating systems - it's the reason why our main 300-man-years application's GUI is still only Telnet (or more accurately, VT Emulation). And yes, new versions of the application are still regularly released.
And as for your curiosity, I mainly maintain the database of that other source-less program. It was written very poorly and it doesn't handle simple problems gracefully, such as disk space running out and database number sequences reaching their limit. I guess 9 years ago they didn't think they'd reach those limits, just like with Y2K.
Saltboy
April 15, 2009 at 6:05am
We are particularly interested in how Windows 7 will do P2P file distribution. If you click on a file on the server, it first checks to see if any nearby peers have the file and gets it from them first as it is faster.
We are skipping Vista and going to Windows 7 as soon as the economy starts looking a little better.
I Jedi
April 14, 2009 at 10:43pm
I'm not personally surprised by this at all. Sure, the economy is in shambles, but besides that, I just don't think that MS shoving a new OS out every three years is the grandest idea. You don't allow for a standard, like we had with XP, it cost tons of money to keep up-to-date, and not to mention incompatibility problems with older software. If it were up to me, I'd say MS needs to honestly build a great OS and stick with it for a few more years than its trying to do with its current scheme.
Taz0
April 15, 2009 at 5:46am
That's exactly what Microsoft is trying NOT to do. One of Vista's biggest challenges was trying to move people who have been sitting on the same OS for 6 long years. Compatibility problems arose (especially driver related) when Microsoft tried the "Revolution" approach, which basically changed the entire underlying OS in one hit, rather than "Evolution" approach, which is what it's doing with Windows 7. A Revolution approach only leads to an uproar. Microsoft is not going to repeat that mistake for quite a while now, expect a new version of Windows every two to three years from now on.
RavenStandsAlone
April 14, 2009 at 9:21pm
I have been testing since the first beta on 7 and I am using 7 Ultimate 6.01.7077 as my sole OS on my Acer Aspire 5520 at stock specs. Hasn't crashed yet, boots far faster than Vista x64, has not failed to find a single piece of hardware nor failed to find correct drivers for every single piece of peripheral that I have added, so far.
Hands down the best OS out of the box yet.
These are the Internets? Where's the beer?
DBsantos77
April 14, 2009 at 8:14pm
Psh it's no surprise that they won't. Microsoft's reputation was severely damaged with the release of Vista. Supposedly W7 is better then Vista, but I won't buy the final release it till I see benchmarks, compatability, and user-friendly reviews.
RedAnt751
April 14, 2009 at 9:11pm
Most IT Departments will not Rollout a new O.S. because of the bugs that are usually present in all new O.S. They usually wait about 12 to 18 months before the 1st rollout.
Taz0
April 15, 2009 at 5:52am
Actually, most IT departments will not rollout a new OS because of application compatibility, particularly Line-of-Business (LOB) applications and custom tailored legacy apps. I myself maintain an application which only runs on Windows 2000, and will not run on XP or any version of Windows, and since the source code is long gone, there is no chance of fixing it, only completely rewriting it (too expensive).
nekollx
April 15, 2009 at 9:26am
unfortunatly with XP support being scaled back Companies have a limited window to work in. So like it or not they have to adopt eventually, by 2014 xp will be a giant security hole when they shut down windows updates for xp.
