Less Than 2 Percent of UK Companies Have Upgraded Windows 200
Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista. Just shy of 5% said that they have begun a Windows Vista desktop upgrade program. 6.5% said they will upgrade in the next 6 months; 12.6% in the next 12 months; 13% in the next 18 months; and 18% in the next two years. That means that within two years from now, only 56% of survey respondents say they will have upgraded their firm's desktops to Windows Vista. 'In terms of retail sales of Vista in a box, Ballmer said he believes most of that up-tick is concentrated in the first few months of the software going on sale. He doubted that this would carry over into Microsoft's fiscal 2008, which began in July 2007. Analyst estimates for fiscal 2008 growth in Microsoft's client business unit, which includes Vista, is around the 9% mark. Ballmer said that analysts should consider that rather than creating huge spurts of new growth "a new Windows release is primarily a chance to sustain the revenue we have".'"
How many... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ambiguous results (Score:4, Interesting)
So what? In two years will 20% of business be running Vista, or 50%?
Can you blame them really? (Score:5, Interesting)
See my thoughts below.
(yes, this is a re-post, unreplied to though and obviously on topic)
When I tried Vista it forced my Dell 8600 laptop to run it's fan in stage 2 of 3 instead of 1/3 that XP does, somewhere CPU use was too high, no matter what I turned off (Aero etc) - on battery or powered.
The interface isn't for me, I couldn't possibly care less about a fluffy 3D interface, I've never used XP's Luna theme and I've been using XP since 6 months after release, I need a functional fast operating system with clever powerful features, I don't 'watch' my OS I use it to get stuff done.
Another reason why I don't want Aero is I do a hell of a lot of RDP'ing and you can't get Aero over RDP.
I would find switching from Vista classic (or XP classic) to Aero, to classic to Aero when switching in and out of my RDP sessions to be very disorientating.
ALSO Aero seemed to offer no real actual benefits to usability, sadly I have to admit after using Mac OSX that the whole expose thing is surprisingly awesome and convienient, that operating system truely makes a mouse user damn near as powerful as a good keyboarder (wow!)
Aero's flip 3D however was ridiculously bad at actually saving you time and effort.
The widget thing / bar on the right was stupid, it should be like Mac OS - it's there, when you need it, hidden and very easily accessable, NOT a bar stuck on the side (auto hide or not, Mac OS wins that)
The search functionality wasn't as good as locate32, I think in file names, not in contents, if I want my CV I search for *resume*.doc on all drives and I'll find it because I memorise the file name (admitedly locate32 isn't native to XP)
Therefore overall Vista didn't offer me anything that honestly helped me.
I used a full retail version of Ultimate and manage to re-produce a bug where connecting to a VPN would instantly blue screen it too (fully patched)
I dislike the smaller 'stylish' min / max / close buttons at the top right, I like them square and easy to find.
Did I mention Windows Explorer sucked? I spend 80% of my time in it, managing files, doing 'stuff' and it's hard to explain but there was a lack of 'lines' and dividers and bars, the data was hard to take in quickly because the interface looked,... weird I couldn't do things quicker with that, the line showing left pane / right pane sucked.
I think (don't quote me) it forced that silly task pane on as well, which is on in XP but disable-able - I don't think you can in Vista (don't quote)
I disliked the breadcrumb style address bar in folders at the top of explorer, admitedly just today someone found a home made patch to disable it but it's not a stock option in Vista and wasn't available when I tried it.
When all is said and done, I would STILL use the thing if someone just made a shell replacement that made it look absoloutely 100% identical to XP classic mode but with a Vista 'engine'. I don't hate DX10 nor do I detest the search, I can always use my own, I don't have to use flip 3d but I do CONSTANTLY use Windows explorer and I need it looking nice, simple and clean to do shit fast, - I felt hamstrung
the telling part is... (Score:3, Interesting)
obviously. there's not really much there in terms of day to day productivity boosters. there's nothing in windows vista that'll change the world or blow my mind. it's pretty easy to to see that this also applies to, for example, office 2007 - how many releases do they need before they get word processing right? the glaring example of this is of course the ribbon bar, imho - a UI change/obfuscation just so that people would have a reason to buy the product again.
Re:How many... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know we are! We rolled out 700+ new workstations this week with Vista pre-installed... and promptly wiped them for our corporate image of XP SP2. What a joke... MS is counting all of these "OEM" sales, but I bet a pretty large proportion of corporate and enterprise "sales" of Vista aren't actually being used.
Re:Can you blame them really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Explorer is great - sure it's different from XP, but it works perfectly for me. You can turn the left pane off, the breadcrums disappear if you click (giving you the ability to type your own addresses in, or copy the current one to the keyboard, or use the mouse to quickly jump from one directory to another.) The detail view works exactly the same as it does on XP, so I didn't have a problem with being slowed down after the change to Vista. Aero does add useful functionality, such as live thumbnails in the alt-tab and the task bar. Flip 3D also has its uses, though I can see it's not for everyone.
You can turn the sidebar off and just have gadgets on your desktop if you want. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. I have a lot of screen real-estate, so I have a clock, CPU monitor, disk space monitor, and a gadget I knocked up to track my torrent downloads at home.
So I'm having a great time with Vista. All the software I want to use works fine with it, performance is through the roof, and I like the interface. I guess it's not for everyone
Maybe never... (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, I would expect it would be at least a year before we adopt Office 2007.
I work at a government laboratory and security is the primary issue.
Upgrades (Score:2, Interesting)
* Having "played" with Vista on another persons new machine and decent spec, it's terrible.
** After learning about Linux from scratch.
Vista == Micro Channel (Score:3, Interesting)
So they fenced in Micro Channel with all kinds of licenses and patents and expected PC manufacturers to beat a path to their door. They didn't. They worked with EISA and VLB and such until PCI came around, and by then IBM was very much an also-ran in the PC market.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities. I think MS's reach is exceeding its grasp here. It happened to IBM (which *owned* computing) and it's starting to happen to MS. Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility (which is why UAC is so broken) and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped at all - years late).
Re:Just moved from Win2k to XP (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Vista == Micro Channel (Score:3, Interesting)
"New technology" that no one really sees as worth the upgrade, with lots of extraneous restrictions (Windows Genuine Advantage, for example) that make it difficult to work with. Dell had to back down and start offering machines with XP again because people didn't want Vista. ISA was inferior to Micro Channel but "good enough" and people stuck with it until there were open alternatives (PCI). XP is still around, but MS can't afford to put much effort into it or it'll continue to undermine Vista. So XP'll stagnate - and the competition isn't sitting still.
Because Windows apps muck around with all kinds of things they shouldn't because Windows grew up from a single-tasking OS with no memory protection. Windows has supported good finegrained security since NT but in practice nobody actually used it because the apps didn't support it, and MS didn't insist. The old techniques still worked because MS never closed the holes. They finally got around to it in Vista, but (a) they are fighting decades of culture they themselves fostered, and (b) they reimplemented a half-ass sudo, but you run into it for all kinds of things because apps insist on doing things they shouldn't. (And that's after they've done a bunch of behind-the-scenes work to lie to applications about what their actual privileges are, so they think they are running with full privs.)
Compare to Unix, where apps are written not to use elevated permissions unless they actually need it. Aside from installing software, I never run into a sudo prompt on my Ubuntu box because the apps behave themselves.
Re:How many... (Score:3, Interesting)
We use a product called Altiris deployment solution. The workstations do a PXE boot (i.e. boot to the network interface) and map a drive to deployment share on PXE server. Then the PXE environment you choose (can be MS-DOS, PC-DOS, barebones windows, Linux etc) acts as an OS for that system, but its running off of a network share, so that it can partition the workstation's hard disk, formats it, and downloads/installs the image with all the software already a part of it. Then one of our admins queues up an appropriate "rename and join the domain" jobs and in about 40 minutes or so we go from a pile of cardboard boxes to a functional Windows XP with all neccessary software installed and ready to roll.
But there are tons of other options... LANDesk is one, and Symantec Ghost is another.