90% of IT Professionals Don't Want Vista

A survey by King Research has found that Ninety percent of IT professionals have concerns using Vista, with compatibility, stability and cost being their key reasons. Interestingly, forty four percent of companies surveyed are considering switching to non-Windows operating systems, and nine percent of those have already started moving to their selected alternative. "The concerns about Vista specified by participants were overwhelmingly related to stability. Stability in general was frequently cited, as well as compatibility with the business software that would need to run on Vista," said Diane Hagglund of King Research.

Yes, but what does "considering" mean?

[Infonaut]

44% are considering moving to another operating system. That's so broad as to be almost useless. "Considering" could mean:

• We've never even thought about other OSes, and we've just picked up our first copy of LinuxWorld magazine to see what all the fuss is about.
• We're really annoyed with Vista. We've started paying more attention to those Apple ads.
• We've started to do some actual cost comparisons between the various options, including Macs, all flavors of Windows, and Linux.
• We're trying out some Macs on a test basis, and we've installed Linux on an old laptop just to see if it's a viable option.
• We're in discussions with the folks at Apple Enterprise Sales to see what kind of price they can give us for our exact requirements.

Re:How many IT professionals...

[CastrTroy]

For expert sexchange, use the cached google page. I haven't found a case yet where the answers weren't shown in the cache.

Vista isn't Stable?

[JustASlashDotGuy]

Has anyone actually had any stability problems with Vista?

In our testing, Vista has been perfectly stable. Our only complaint is that 3rd party software hasn't been updated to work with it yet (IE: be it applications such as our Audit software, or Web-based SSL VPN from Cisco ).

Some users bitched about the new GUI, but these are the same users that complained about XP's different start menu and forced 2000-class on everyone for a while.

We will happily move to Vista once the 3rd party apps work with it. Blaming Vista because 3rd party apps don't work with it makes as about as much sense as blaming Mac or *nix because, CCH didn't write a tax app for them.

Vista killed a lot of backward compatibility by making things more secure. Although their implementation of this security leaves a lot to be desired (accept/deny). We have no doubt that the 3rd party vendors will eventually update their apps accordingly.

Stability issue would definitely cause us to push our deployment schedule back, however right now we are only waiting on the vendors to update their software (all hardware works fine so far).

Re:Yes, but what does "considering" mean?

[porcupine8]

The article breaks it down a little bit more:

"Clearly many companies are serious about this alternative, with 9% of those saying they have considered non-Windows operating systems already in the process of switching and a further 25% expecting to switch within the next year," the report "Windows Vista Adoption and Alternatives" reads.

So about a third of that 44% have at least made it past your first two stages, and some of those are in the final stage.

Re:Well there you have it

[Anonymous Coward]

Difference is.... retailers back then didn't had to give a downgrade to xp option (forced in this case) as Vista now. Give me one example where retailers had to give w2k or w98 licenses to people who had computers bought with XP licenses.

You can stick your head in the sand and refuse to see... but that wont make an ostrich out of you.... just dumber then usual.

Re:How many IT professionals...

[AbRASiON]

Yep, I work for an Australian Govt Dept and we migrated to XP about 3 years ago and XP SP2 about 3 months ago.
Things are really quite smooth at work.

We're buying machines under 800$ with monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc and running XP perfectly fine on them.
If we were to consider Vista, the SOE manager wouldn't put Vista on a box with less than dual core and 2gb of ram (and I don't blame him)
XP does all we need it to do right now and it does it well.

Vista would be a support nightmare, I can envision workplaces looking at CTX / Ubuntu setups in the near future definately.
It's possible we would migrate to Vista but I can't imagine it happening for at least 2 or even 3 years, it'll be 4 years old then - terrible.

Re:Vista isn't Stable?

[dave420]

I got a Dell with Vista pre-installed, and I decided to see if I could get along with it. I made sure I had an XP CD lying around to install should Vista not suit my needs. Well, it's a few months later, and I'm still using it. The performance is excellent, all my software works (granted it's pretty much only Adobe CS3, an SSH/FTP client, VPN client, packet sniffers, and games), and I've had no reason to change back to XP. I happen to appreciate the new GUI - it's very smooth, responsive, and coherent. I'm using it in conjunction with a Small Business Server 2003 box, and they play very nicely together. It's behaving well on the domain, the volume shadow copy functionality is working well. There are no stability problems - it doesn't crash, it doesn't need rebooting to "clear" the memory, nothing. It flies.

Seeing as Vista is selling better than XP was at this stage in its release, I don't think Vista is going anywhere. There were compatibility problems with XP, too, and they were overcome.

Re:Well there you have it

[nschubach]

Vista Pros: DX10 gaming

If the latest Crysis Demo has anything to say about it, there goes one of your "Pros."

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2209704,00.asp [extremetech.com]

Re:Well there you have it

[Barny]

Cons: memory usage...

As another news site [theinquirer.net] points out [theinquirer.net] and microsoft themselves agree, Vista, on a per box basis, uses more memory to boot than a supercomputer...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx [microsoft.com]

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/ccs/sysreqs.mspx [microsoft.com]

Oh and don't look at the disk space requirements, they are truly frightening :)

Re:Vista isn't Stable?

[JasterBobaMereel]

Is Vista stable? I don't care... Will my programs be stable on it ... I do care

If the 3rd party apps that work on XP/2000 don't work on Vista then it will appear to be unstable, it does not matter if it is the OS or the app the impression is that Vista is unstable.

Blaming Vista if a 3rd party app that works on XP does not work on Vista should be blamed on Vista, the 3rd party wrote the app for Windows, not XP, so it should work on "Windows". Losing support for legacy apps (16 bit etc..) is fine but all 32 bit apps should work. It is not like a Windows app not working on a Mac, the app probably has a "Designed for Microsoft Windows" sticker on the box and Vista is "Microsoft Windows"! One of the annoying parts of Vista is the files/registry sandboxing it does specifically to support older apps.

If I can't get stable drivers for my hardware - why should I upgrade
If I have to upgrade my hardware to use it - why should I upgrade
If I can't run my apps - why should I upgrade

Please don't say DX10 - I don't run games
Please don't say security - I don't believe it is *secure* and XP is secure enough (with other apps to close the gaps)
Please don't say it's pretty - I don't care

Give me a real reason.....

Re:Well there you have it

[Firethorn]

Actually, some did have to give licenses to 2k over XP, at least until service pack 1 or so.

Vista is having some of the pains, looks worse right now, but we'll have to wait and see I think to see if Vista turnes into a ME or not.

Re:Well there you have it

[dhavleak]

Thanks to user account control. I was locked out of all the data I had hoped to save, including my outlook mail and contacts therein. Permanently gone and unrecoverable.

Doesn't add up. UAC is just a mechanism by which your user processes (assuming you are an admin on the machine) lack an admin token until you explicity grant them that token (by clickng yes on the UAC prompt). How does this prevent you from doing a backup/restore (or even a copy operation, which is what it sounds like you did)? Depending on the ACLs on source/destination folders you may or may not have to evelate the process that is copying files across. If UAC is genuinely preventing you from recovering your files (which I seriously doubt) turn it off, complete backup, turn it back on. Not sure how to? Google it. The SD card not speeding up your machine sounds correct. SD cards generally have crappy data transfer rates, and shouldn't be accepted by Vista for ReadyBoost (depending on specs of individual SD card). Even if your card has a fast enough transfer rate, what's it's capacity? And lastly, knowing how caches work, you shouldn't expect magic from readyboost -- even when it works, the difference should be intangible for the most part. Just like a Core 2 Duo with a 2MB cache is slower than a Core 2 Duo with a 4MB cache, assuming the same clock and FSB - and yet when you actually use them, for the most part the difference will be intangible.

Re:Well there you have it

[ILongForDarkness]

I'm interviewing for EA right now. They say they don't use, and have no intentions in the near term to migrate to Vista. Heck DX10 couldn't even sell Vista to a game company.

Re:Well there you have it

[johnw]

and everything that came before was going away; all the stuff, a year ago they were saying was the future.

I wonder if it's even possible to count how many times Microsoft have iterated through that cycle. I stopped developing on Microsoft platforms about 9 years ago and this is one of the main reasons.