Enterprise Market Cautious on Vista Adoption

No compelling reason to upgrade from XP?

Published on November 28, 2006 By Zoomba In WinCustomize News

Later this week, Microsoft makes Windows Vista available to business customers. Microsoft is expecting Vista to be the fastest adopted version of Windows ever, expecting enterprises especially to leap at the opportunity to upgrade from XP as soon as possible. Many have questioned this expectation, and Silicon.com put the question to its 12-person CIO panel. The result? Only one of the 12 plan on upgrading within the first year of Vista's release. 6 of them said they would wait 1-2 years, with the rest waiting 2-3 years.

ZDNet does a little bit of analysis of the jury results. Seems most companies will at least wait for Service Pack 1 to come out to resolve the most glaring issues with the Vista RTM code.

Comments

AiTakahashi

on Nov 28, 2006

I find Microsoft's attitude quite surprising, and not a little stoked by marketing, given that the majority (about 85%-ish) of all PCs we get into our workshop for repair/reinstall are only barely capable of running XP home, properly, let alone Vista. After having arm-wrestled 100's of customers into doubling their RAM (and the rest) to run XP, I can't see them being overly enthusiastic about having to replace all they have just paid for with a new CPU/mobo/RAM/vidcard just so MS can boast that Vista is "every bit the success we forced, err... intended".

Orion

on Nov 28, 2006

That's funny. I just read another article yesterday that was quite the opposite. I guess it really doesn't matter, people and companies are going to do what they're going to do. Since our two-factor authentication scheme we use doesn't work on Vista yet, I'm in no rush to shove it out to my enterprise. I personally don't think my Joe/Jane Blow users would see any benefit over XP. Powerusers on the other hand....

FWIW, after installing and testing on several P4-2.4/512RAM-class systems, Vista actually seems to be zippier than XP on the same class box.

On my AMD X2 @ 3GHz, SATA-300 RAID-0, 2GB RAM, nVidia 7800GTS 512VRAM, Vista absolutely smokes!

Excalpius

on Nov 28, 2006

I doubt very many people will take the XP->Vista upgrade route, as myself and many other are advising against it. Not only does it seem to result in a terribly munged installation (seemingly much worse than 98->XP ever did), but it requires RAM and graphic card hardware updates (beyond the expertise of most consumers) at a minimum, and some of the widest legacy hardware STILL does not work with Vista (and in the case of the Soundblaster Live series of sound cards, never will).

And there is NO WAY that businesses see any advantage to Vista in any way right now. They are just getting XP locked, loaded, and reliable, and quite honestly, there isn't any new feature of Vista that is attractive to the enterprise customer. A flashy new interface is the LAST thing an IT team is going to risk corporate stability on, haha.

So I fully expect Vista to be a "when you buy a new computer, it comes with Vista" issue. And with all the ridiculous segmenting of the Vista versions, even that is going to take some time for the OEM's to shake out. I'm sure they'd prefer to ship with Vista Ultimate at a fair price, but MS has made that impossible. So, they will try and ship with Vista Home Premium (Home Basic, Startup, and the N editions are dead on arrival, folks) and do their best not to make it sound like the consumer has to pay for an upgrade to their OS (to Ultimate) the minute they get home. And that is essentially what most people are going to have to do in order to get the "Vista Experience" that the MS ads and OEM's will be advertising but unable to deliver.

Given the lack of compelling features at release, all the negative press over the two version development cycle etc. etc., I think MS has really screwed the pooch this time around. Fortunately for MS, the new Office is getting rave reviews. I expect the corporate IT cycles to divert their budgets and training schedules in that direction.

Lantec

on Nov 28, 2006

As long as there's compatablitiy with Server 2003 I'll probably just "Upgrade" as I replace old machines or buy new ones to meet growth. What that means for me is anywhere from 3 to 5 years before I'll fully integrate Vista.....probably just in time for whatever comes next. I've only got 10 employees so I'm not exactly "Enterprise market" I've got 10 desktops and 2 laptops all running XP Pro/Office 2003 (not including the server) and it's cost and time prohibitive for me to just upgrade because there's a new OS available.

Corky_O

on Nov 28, 2006

Our company (around 100 desktops and a few notebooks) has been running XP for maybe 3 years, and still runs Office XP. Vista is a long way off.

For my part on the home front, I would love to upgrade to the new OS immediately, but I have seen no documentation on the Adobe CS2 update plans (some parts are not currently compatible with the OS and/or 'Aero' interface). This is just one issue among many that would need to be answered before spending the equivelent of a month's groceries for a couple of upgrades.

I would opt for spending the money on Office 2007 if Adobe and others do not deliver full compatibility updates/patches by March, 2007.

Buttermaker

on Nov 28, 2006

By corporate law, it should be made mandatory to make the switch from XP to Vista within the first 8 months.

ZubaZ

on Nov 28, 2006

22,000 employees at my company. As old PCs run out of warranty they will be replaced with new running Vista. We have been testing for over a year and since we are a support company (and Microsoft Gold Partner, our clients expect us to have the newest of everything.

I don't think many corporations will upgrade "because it's there". They'll upgrade when the support costs merit it.

FWIW, not upgrading early and then having the vendor drop support can get very expensive and gut wrenching. A slow migration is the way to go.

Excalpius

on Nov 29, 2006

By corporate law, it should be made mandatory to make the switch from XP to Vista within the first 8 months.

You REALLY need to include a

when being sarcastic...

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