Half Of Businesses Still Use Windows 2000 640
bonch writes "An AssetMetrix study shows that half of business are still running Windows 2000 four years after the release of Windows XP, and that usage of Windows 2000 has only decreased by 4% since 2003. Microsoft will officially stop supporting Windows 2000 by the end of this month, offering one last update rollup later this year. Windows XP's slower adoption illustrates Microsoft's difficulty in competing with the popularity of its own software platform, and makes it more difficult for Microsoft to convince people to upgrade when Longhorn is released late next year."
Why upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good enough wins. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cost dictates buisnesses (Score:2, Interesting)
The initial model of growth probably was that as buisnesses purchase and add NEW hardware, they will obivously prefer latest software. Now that PC penertration has into businesses has almost saturated, this model will no longer mean profitable buisness for microsoft.
Speaking of XP... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But maybe not (Score:3, Interesting)
The same is true of most shops that run Unix. Or any major software such as Oracle for that matter. You need to wait until the release is stable, and you need to pick a time to convert when you'll get the most bang for your buck. Jumping in early rarely benefits your company. I'm a little surprised that 2000 is still that prevalent.
Soft Sell Upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a lot of work for Microsoft programmers and designers to pull off and a lot of expense. But most of this work needs to be done anyway and in the long term it can only pay off for the company and for its customers. Longhorn is going to take a while to get here, so they might as well make it worth the effort.
What new features? (Score:4, Interesting)
For the life of me, I can't figure out why anybody would consider moving thousands of workstations to XP. The only thing I can come up with is the built in firewall which can be controlled via group policy.
User interface improvements? Big deal, so now it looks like nintendo. Better help? Users call the help desk. 64 bit? Big deal...
-Intelligent User Interface
-Comprehensive Digital Media Support
-Greater Application and Device Compatibility
-Enhanced File and Print Services
-Improved Networking and Communications
-Integrated Help and Support Services
-Improved Mobile Computing
-Reliability Improvements
-Stronger Security Protections
-Easier Manageability
-64-Bit Support
-Looking Forward: The Microsoft
We keep Win98-SE (Score:3, Interesting)
MS lifecycle says it has to be (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out the table. Notice how the licencing end dates run out at the end of this year for OEMs and next year for system builders? Longhorn has to fill that spot or the contracts need to be renegotiated.
Not only that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And the other half? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why upgrade? (Score:3, Interesting)
My company used to have the attitude that their well firewalled network + NAT was nice and secure. And it was, until someone plugged an infected laptop into the network (I think it was blaster, could be wrong).
Thankfully my 2k box was uptodate with patches. However the network became unusable for at least a day.
MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing is - what % of businesses are XP? Even if MS get some of the Win2K people to go to XP - how are they going to get the XP people to go to Longhorn? It isn't going to happen extensively!!! MS are actually possibly more screwed (at least in terms of getting people to Longhorn) if they get Win2K people to go to XP at this stage.
And it's still long time to wait for direct Win2K -> Longhorn upgrades (2 years? More? -including evaluation/install time for businesses).
hoisted on their own petard (Score:1, Interesting)
Still using Win95 (Score:3, Interesting)
No real surprises here (Score:2, Interesting)
Now I have the servers running Linux and even still, XP machines have problems playing nice with the samba shares. Win2k works fine, however. Go figure.
Little problems in XP not in 2k (Score:4, Interesting)
1. MSN Messenger auto running. Sure in a corp environment you can just have it disabled but it's annoying for small businesses that just don't have the IT resources to do it.
2. OS popups. Notifications above the tray that bring you the most inane messages ever. Try plugging in a USB2 device into a system that only has USB1.1 and follow the popup's instructions. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? I'm sure this is from MS's "usability" group that brought us Clippy and Search Mutt.
3. Window pane focus changes. This one I just don't understand. In 2k, if I open Windows Explorer in folder view, I can use the scroll wheel to scroll the pane that the mouse is over. In XP, I have to click the pane first to scroll. This probably doesn't affect many people but for those that it does, it is super annoying.
Since 2k still works for most people, I can see why XP would have such a problem replacing it.
Re:But maybe not (Score:3, Interesting)
From AssetMetrix (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows NT popularity was reduced from 13.5% to about 10%; and
Windows XP became the most popular operating system for companies with fewer than 250 PCs."
I don't think ME was ever popularly deployed in businesses. I shudder to think about it. Win2k was available then.
ReactOS applicable to this discussion? (Score:2, Interesting)
A GPL clone of the software that Microsoft no longer supports would allow internal fixing of broken things -- as long as the clone correctly runs the software in use.
Here's a thought... (Score:3, Interesting)
While they'll bitch and moan, you'll have tons of programmers on the side who'd be chomping at the bit to supply support for legacy systems/OSes.
Hell, I imagine that for the most part, you have the potential to rebuild a good deal of the computer industry, just by fixing holes in old MS products, etc, that MS in turn would save a fortune in no longer having to support.
Its Microsoft NOT knowing their customers. (Score:4, Interesting)
While it may be fine for a Microsoft customer (Don't laugh. So its like a Mafia customer. They make them an offer...) like Dell to sell all the machines with XP pre-installed we (a Dell customer to the tune of several 10K units per year) just strip that puppy off the machine and install a plain vanilla Win2k from a CD because its absolute murder on the software when something changes.
If the OS changes and breaks something in our software, its a lot tougher and more expensive for us to fix (when its even possible. We probably won't be able to rehire the same team and most of the, uh, interesting documentation was done by osmosis.)
Microsoft's XP can sit on the shelf 'till the Longhorn cows come home.
Win2K is curently fine. We wouldn't even have gotten off NT4.0 if they hadn't 'end-of-life'd it. It did what was required and stayed out of the way.
If that hurts Microsoft's pocket book, maybe they should get into the toy business.
Windows 2000 is pretty solid. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that usage has only dropped by 4% shows that their customers still want to use it. I would think they would do a better job of doing what their clients want.
This seems like a bad move.
Re:Not only that (Score:3, Interesting)
Activation by phone (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not quite sure what the limitations are, but Microsoft obviously has measures in place to limit the number of times someone can re-activate XP that way. I've had customers who radically changed and upgraded their PCs a number of times over the last few years. When they had a drive crash and no good backups, it was up to me to swap out their drive and re-install XP and their apps from scratch. Their key refused to activate again, because apparently, MS decided it had been re-activated too often already and they put some kind of "block" on the code.
Re:And the other half? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the desk workstations where I work do run Win2K It's what came with them and the license is corporate wide. It isn't broken (If you don't count annoyances such as IE and BSOD's as breakage) why fix it. The fix (XP) is not free of the problems the current version has. It just crashes less often. In additon it comes with it's own set of new problems such as applications that won't run properly on it.
This is Microsoft's point exactly... (Score:1, Interesting)
They explicitly do not want you rebuilding / reloading machines on a regular ongoing basis as a consumer of their operating system.
- They want you to buy a machine with the XP installed already, and only use it just the way the machine was equipped and configured from the vendor. After all you agreed to that when you accepted the license.
- If you change your machine's hardware, they want to consider that to then be a different machine, and hence, a need for you to buy a new license for it. The reason is so that they can sell more licenses.
- If you wish to be in the regular habit of constantly changing hardware around they desire you to buy a new machine each and every time configed with that specific set of hardware you desire, and of course a new O/S license on each and every one. The reason is so that the computer makers (e.g. Dell, HP, etc) can sell more hardware and MS can sell more licenses.
- MS wishes ultimately to force an end to the "do-it-yourselfer" hobbiest computer builder, to make all home consumers of computers buy them only from commercial computer makers in rigidly fixed sets of hardware configurations and also put an end to the corporations who build and maintain their own hardware in house... all in the name of propping up commerce for Dell/HP/etc, and of course themselves. In their minds, when your current computer hardware breaks, or if you would like to change out / upgrade some of your hardware , then if you don't buy a whole machine from a system vendor, then you are "stealing business" from such vendors.
Re:MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:3, Interesting)
I do sysadmin work, and yes, RDP on the desktop is invaluable. Also, being able to Remote to my home machines is also a great tool. Need to test a web, email, whatever server from the outside world? Remote to my home desktop (XP Pro) and then connect from it to the service to be tested. Also, Server 2003 has RDP built in for remote administration, which means that the flat panel/keyboard combo in the rack is collecting dust.
Other than that though, I do find that XP is like 2000 with a GUI done by Crayola. Sure, it now has lots of multi-media stuff built in; but, this is an office PC, not a home desktop, I don't need people playing with Movie Maker in the office.
I can see why a lot of people are not upgrading to XP from 2000, there just isn't a really good reason. When Longhorn finally releases (ignoring the chilly draft comming from hell) I'm expecting that there will be a lot of people on XP who will see no reason to upgrade, and those on 2000 will probably continue to sit there. MS needs to find and add some sort of "must have" feature before people will be willing to jump. From Win98 to WinNT we gained some level of network security. From WinNT to Win2K we gained a lot of stability and more security. From Win2K to WinXP we got built in RDP, and a funny looking GUI; not many people saw these as needed. From WinXP to Winwhatever the hell the call it I just don't see what they are going to add that we want. Better integration with
Re:MS are in a bit of a pickle really (Score:3, Interesting)