I notice that in the logs for my web site, I see Windows XP clients far outnumbering Windows Vista clients, especially on corporate networks. Why would corporate networks be holding back on upgrading to Vista. I could see home users putting it off becuase of the price, but why are so many corporate networks still running XP?
don't be silly. there is simply no need for it yet.
Wait for at least the first SP - what's the rush? You finally have XP under control, why open another can of worms? that's what you have your geeks, "early adopters" and IT people for - let them test it first.
my 2 cents. M
Drivers for business adoption of Vista are different to consumers. The eye candy isn't going to sell it to the corporate world (and most existing corporate desktops won't have the video horsepower to run Aero unless they're new-ish), and for large enterprise they're probably not really interested in upgrading from XP from a functionality point of view. XP is still supported till 2010 or so, so there's no pressing need in terms of security, support and patching to move.
Enterprise tends to get their Windows install with new hardware, which tends to be bought on a 3 year cycle. Over the next year or so you'll see the proportion of Vista clients in enterprise increase sharply, I'd expect - provided Vista's foibles don't irritate corporations enough to hold on to XP and move to a Linux-based desktop... There's also the "always-wait-until-SP1" thing.
Upgrading an enterprises' standard desktop client isn't at all trivial in terms of testing, rollout, etc and so it's not going to be done without real business benefits...
Why bother upgrading to Vista?
The only really new feature is Aero, and that doesn't work on business PCs.
Upgrading to a new OS takes a lot of time (and money), and we're not talking about "Oh, just reinstall the machine" here - a project to migrate a medium-sized company to Vista would mean setting up a test group, installing Vista on all the different PC and laptop models used in the company, testing all applications used in the company, creating new HD images, then reinstalling hundreds of machines.
There are even companies who still work happily with Win2k and would trade all Vista licenses for continued Win2k-support.
Juergen Nieveler
There is no ROI for vista in most environments where XP is already in place.
Because most IT people worth their salt know that you don't put Vista on hardware designed for XP. And now that laptops have garnered over 50% market, it is even more true. You buy a state-of-the art laptop with the current version of Windows. In 4 or 5 years, you throw it away.
My wife's company (Fortune 100), leases (tax BS, I am sure) all of their laptops. She gets a new one every 3 or 4 years. A year ago or so she turned in her old laptop (Win2K). When the lease is up on this one (XP Pro), in a couple of years, she will get a new Vista laptop.
And all of this is due to the MS Office Suite, of course. The OS is really of no consequence whatsoever. She will be using Office 2003 Professional with XP Pro until she gets a new laptop. As long as Outlook, Excel and Word are all usable, who cares about the OS? At least in the corporate world.
Ron :)
Is there ROI on a new environment I wonder?
And not even then. Business-grade PCs rarely have a DX9-capable graphics card, they have cheap on-board solutions.
Nope, not even that. The larger the Enterprise, the more they try to get things standardised so that helpdesk expenses are kept low.
In our company (500+ users local, 20000+ in the corporate network) the machines had XP license stickers on them for a year before we switched from NT4, and even then only because AD security policies were changed and NT4 wouldn't work anymore...
Or rather: Major threats from M$ to withdraw support. Even migration from NT4 to XP didn't offer any real business benefits except Active Directory.
Juergen Nieveler
Many of the corporations I work with still haven't completed migrating to XP (or finished the migration after Vista went RTM)
If everything was new, servers, workstations, laptops, and Vista Business came preinstalled, the expense for the added power and memory and crap that Vista needs over XP would already be counted.
There is no ROI for Vista in a business.
I dont think very many corporations would move to Linux. Windows is a MUST for computing existence, for many businesses.
In the Internet radio business, assuming the looming royalty rate hike does not shut the industry down, worldwide, Windows will always be a must. This is becuase many of the providers of streaming services can only support Windows. With most services, you transmit your broadcast to the streaming provider using streaming MP3 format, and then they convert it into Windows Media, Real, or other formats. Windows Media, Real, and MP3 streaming are not available for Linux. Shoutcast, and similar programs, needed to transmit to many of the streaming service providers, ONLY run in WINDOWS.
Also, Microsoft office is the standard in office productivity software, and is ONLY available for Windows. If you are not running MS Offfice, then you are not running the world standard in office productivity. This alone, I think, will keep many businesses from going to Linux.
As much as there was for XP, 2000, etc. There is no one single feature which necessitates the upgrade, but as business critical software begins to take advantage of new features, as the new security controls are needed, and as users become more familiar with Vista, it may be worthwhile to upgrade.
My girlfriend's last $DAYJOB was in the process of migrating from 2000 to XP SP2 due to the fact that some of their business critical software was requiring XP (and yes, it actually used some APIs that were only availabilities in XP)
At my $DAYJOB we discontinued support for NT4 because we needed unicode support. 2000 is on the chopping block on the server side, although probably not on the client side for a bit longer (Although this is mostly a guess)
The immediate ROI is that if you phase it in with new hardware, where the new hardware already is Vista ready, you don't have to deal with an upgrade down the road.
Whether a homogenous environment is more suitable, or a slow migration is better will really depend on your user base.
Rule #1: If it's shit, don't buy it. Rule #2: If it doesn't offer any real benefit, don't upgrade Rule #3: Wait till the first service pack, that is until all major bugs have been found and fixed.
I'm not sure about Windows Media, but I know for a fact that Real and MP3 streaming, including shoutcast, is available for Linux.
Well, MS does still release a Macintosh version every now and then :-)
Although some businesses get by using alternatives like OpenOffice, I tend to agree with this. MS Office pretty much dominates that market.
Almost the same situation, except that Moving from 2000 to XP only required modest upgrades and provided an even more stable platform once you removed the glitz. With XP to Vista it's much different, even a Dual Xeon 3Ghz, 4GB RAM, 128MB Video card running Vista BE is slow, and you can be sure that the same machine running XP or 2000 was a screamer.
And there is a COST with phasing it in with new hardware, as many things, like SBS, require changes, to allow Vista to work in that environment, and lets not think about people with roaming profiles that move between a Vista machine and an XP machine.
I would think that one department at a time, one that can tolerate down- time, one that can tolerate slower operation on the same machines...
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