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.

I hate to re-post this but,....

[AbRASiON]

Please, don't mod down, just don't mod up if you don't like re-posts? How's that for a deal.
Vista's flaw isn't it's lack of a service pack it's the complete lack of THOUGHT in the design of the operating system.
The user interface is quite simply, messy - it's appalling, frustrating, confusing and slow.

Re-post below, sorry but damnit if it's not on topic and fitting (mind the language, I was pissed off when I wrote it)
(I wonder if Microsoft chumps read this site, I can post this all I want but how do I get these darn issues addressed, where do I post this to tell these idiots to wake the hell up?)
Anyhow, here goes..

First off, this post and my subsequent replies, my "general whinge with the OS"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=304745&cid=20695969 [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org]

Then in a little bit more detail
(crosspost of a post I made on a forum not more than 24 hours ago, I finally documented precisely why Vista Explorer shits me to tears)
Warning: Bad language ahead.

Why does Windows Vista insist on a startup sound, despite me disabling all sounds, they are turned off but it does one at startup, I like quiet and what if I don't want to wake people up?

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, I may have railed on Vista for performance problems, specifically in Crysis, you do need to give a new operating system a 'pass' for a while, let it settle in (it's nearly been a year though!!!)

My beef still sits with Windows Explorer, something I use daily, a lot at work and home, I need it clean, simple and easy to get data into my face as quick as possible so I can react as quickly as possible (yes, I sorry to big note but I am, *that* quick on the keyboard and when working with files)

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh01.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Apply to all folders won't let me save the options for "Computer" (My Computer) or Desktop, this is annoying.
also, fuck the breadcrumbs bar, in the ASSSSS

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh02.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
That motherfucker 'task pane' which is taking space up from my damn explorer view.
Sure, I found some website suggesting I shrink the size of it (yay) but I can still accidentally click the bastard, plus it still looks messy.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh03.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Mofo! I accidentally clicked it, see explanation of why it eats babies in the JPG itself.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy01.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Those little box pluses, I like them, why take them away? It's confusing and slowing down the amount of data I can take in per 'scene' I need info and you're witholding it, just so you can pretend you're neater than you actually are.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy02.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
Ahh my boxes are back, this is good, also more cluttered shit.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf01.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com]
You call this a save as dialogue box?
I hit shift tab twice (yes, I do often, try it people) to navigate quickly to where I normally would on XP.
I slap backspace like 10 times fast, this should ensure I'm at desktop, almost instantly (shift tab x2 and backspace x10 takes me 1 second)
Does it work? no, of course it doesn't you breadcrumb whores.

soooo I hit browse

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf02.jpg [shackspace.com] [shackspace.com] oh oh
Hot jesus, make the fucking hurting stop!
This is one of the best reasons WHY I can't deal, look at it

Re:Nothing new.

[kevmatic]

Not so much. Remember that many many many companies never did switch over to XP from 2k. 2k, last I checked (about a year ago), was still the most wildly used Windows. People act as though XP has 100% entirely replaced every last 2k or something. It hasn't. Adoption wasn't as fast as MS would have liked, and you can see attempts at keeping MS from repeating XP all through Vista's launch.

What I don't remember about XP, either, was mass outcry about XP-only machines and vendors offering downgrade options. I don't remember that one bit.

No, this isn't like the release of XP at all.

I remember when I had 98 and was more or less forced to upgrade (try running 98 on 2Ghz+ hardware). I was EXTREMELY hesitant to upgrade, I mean, 98 was good, right? Games didn't work right, right? DOS stuff? It took me about 5 minutes to love 2k and I never looked back to 98. Trying out Vista, though, for the first time last week (and on the same machine I had tried to run 98 on years ago), the same thing certainly didn't happen. I was never so happy to reboot back into Gentoo before.

MS blunder

[rice_burners_suck]

If you read my journal, you'll see that my latest post is an expansion of my sig. You see, Microsoft's motto used to be "Where do you want to go today?" If that were still the case today, I think it would be a multiple choice question, and the choices would be:

• Mac OS X (Server or traditional version)
• Linux (pick your favorite distro)
• *BSD (pick your favorite distro)
• Other UNIX system.

The ironic thing is that all of these alternative OSes are UNIX-based or UNIX-like.

Back to my sig and journal, I haven't used Windows on my own computers for a number of years now, but I do administer a number of XP machines for my employer. This is soon to change as we are seriously considering a move to the Mac platform for all of this company's computers, and for the two must-have Windows-only applications that we use on only two of our machines, we will install VMware and run XP in a virtual machine. We have been testing this configuration for a number of months now and it is rock solid. Not only that, but these two apps are major engineering applications with four and five digit price tags, and although the versions we use are 7 years old, they do the job we need them to do and no upgrade is necessary, so it will be unnecessary for us to switch to Vista any time soon.

We did evaluate Vista when it first came out. The evaluation was a short one because we immediately recognized that MS made a big blunder with Vista. To begin with, the installer took forever to load, and then gleefully told us, in shiny letters on a colorful background, how Windows Vista saves you time, as if to say that if the Installer works this slowly, wait 'till you see the operating system! Once the system was up and running, it became quite apparent that it was a joke. We realized that if we were to embrace Vista, it would mean replacing all of our computers, training most of the employees who use them due to the interface's heavy changes, and have many issues with speed, compatibility, and integration. In short, the cost would be horrendous, and at the end of the day, we couldn't find any justification for this expense, even if we tried.

That is the bottom line. Tremendous cost; no benefit. This is Microsoft's blunder. They simply can't keep forcing upgrades because XP does everything that most businesses need from an operating system, and the course MS should have taken is one of incremental improvements. Had they spent the last five years fixing bugs, cleaning up code, optimizing the bottlenecks of the system, tightening up security, and providing new features slowly and incrementally, they would probably have Windows XP with instant search and a database file system working by now. The only additional misfeature that Vista provides is its incredibly ugly, slow, and resource hogging interface, and we want no part of that. In fact, we run all our XP machines without the Luna interface because we think that's ugly as well.

Vista is MS's fastest product launch ever

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, Vista is Microsoft's fastest product launch ever, and easily has exceeded XP's sales at the same point:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20070517/ai_n19115496 [findarticles.com]

And MS reported a 27% surge in revenue on strong Vista sales:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2207551,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000610 [eweek.com]

It's really only on Slashdot that it's a failure.

Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released

It did? I still use Windows 2000 every day an the only apps I can't use are mostly those that were specifically designed for XP. Also, the enterprise still makes heavy use of Win2k - and for good reason - it's just as stable as XP and it lacks all the "activation" crap. There are only a few features that XP brought to make the upgrade appealing which is why a huge chunk of the enterprise still use Win2k after all this time.

I (and I'm sure many others) feel that Windows 2000 was the best operating system Microsoft has designed to date. I woudn't go so far as to claim that I like it more than UNIX-like operating systems but I do think it pretty damn impressive coming from Microsoft.

Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[Corporate Troll]

Oh, I understood that completely....

I have worked for banks (actually, I mostly work for banks), and they are notorious for being slow. So, in late 2004, a grand 3 years after the Windows XP release we were using NT 4.0 SP-5 on the desktop. On new Dell machines, nevertheless. While in a banking setup it wasn't important, there were no drivers for the soundcards and I believe the used a Matrox model they installed themselves that was still supported on NT 4.0 or somesuch thing.

I'm just stating that if you want to stay with Windows, staying with an older version is going to bite you in the ass sooner or later.

On the other hand, I have to admit that the end-users are quite aware about Vista problems. In the last two months, I had calls from three non-computer-savvy ladies who know I give "free" advice. They all needed a new computer and were aware of the problems with Vista. I was surprised about that. I pointed all three to Apple.

Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[Corporate Troll]

I (and I'm sure many others) feel that Windows 2000 was the best operating system Microsoft has designed to date.

Oh, I'm one of those. Microsoft peaked with Win2k, but are you sure you get all security updates? Is IE7 available for your system. Does Office 2007 work for you?

As you read in my post, I switched to XP very late. Why did I switch? There is exactly one feature that is so useful in a home setting, that I still wonder why it hasn't been backported to Win2k. For me the "killer feature" was "fast user switching".

Re:Well there you have it

[purpledinoz]

I'm no IT expert, but this is my impression of Vista.
Vista Pros: DX10 gaming. More secure?
Vista Cons: Slower, expensive, driver problems, compatibility issues.
I don't see a reason for businesses to switch to Vista, unless you play games at work. Does anyone see any real benefit for a business user to switch to Vista?

"Heterogeneous systems" issue

[dpbsmith]

"Yet heterogeneous systems management could be a barrier to going with a provider other than Microsoft, the survey found. Respondents reported that challenges include the need to manage multiple operating systems (49%) and the need to learn a different set of management tools (50%)."

Right... exactly the same set of challenges faced by anyone trying to manage more than one version of Windows.

I've always thought that a good measure of the quality of a software ecosystem is its ability to tolerate version skew between components that would be reasonably expected to be forward-compatible. Conversely, if an ecosystem only works smoothly when everything is at exactly the right version and patch level... particularly when the right version is not the latest version, it's an indication of a combination of poor engineering and poor management.

It was a revelation to me when, circa 1991, I heard software developers in a Fortune 500 company use the word "port" to describe what they needed to do to transition software from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1.

This sort of situation is tolerated by Microsoft and other large dominant companies (including Apple, these days, within its own fiefdom of dominance) and by their customers, up to a point.

To some degree it's a win-win scenario. A homogenous environment reduces everyone's support costs, provides a smoother user experience, and allows sloppy engineering to go tolerated and unpunished. It's zero-sum with regard to the cost of keeping the whole company updated, though: that costs the customer and mostly benefits the vendor. Still, a big customer will tolerate that cost, because there's some benefit, in terms of smoother operation. True, better engineering would allow heterogenous versions to interoperate smoothly, so in theory one could have the benefit without the cost, but this is the real world, and many customers may not like the upgrade treadmill but nevertheless see as being the best option.

But there's a breaking point, and it comes if it is not really practical for the customer to go to a homogeneous system.

Clearly it's not practical for a big company to go with homogenous Windows Vista yet.

Microsoft had better have come up with something truly commendable in Vista SP1.

"Just like XP flopped...."

[Joce640k]

Windows XP/2000 didn't flop because the alternative was much worse (ie. Windows ME).

Anything was better than trying to make ME work. NT4 wasn't really an option because of missing USB drivers, etc. (Microsoft was deliberately using things like lack of USB to help force the upgrade from NT4 to XP).

These days the alternative to Vista (ie. sticking with XP) is a better option, and Microsoft has nothing to leverage (DirectX 10 isn't going to force anybody to upgrade...)

Microsoft is like an ex-wife

[GomezAdams]

Buying Microsoft products is like having an ex-wife you are obligated to pay all expenses for. When she gets a new dress you have to buy her a new house and abandon the old one. Then the new dress needs all new accessories and even unrelated kitchen appliances and a car.

But then buying Apple products is the same except it starts with a new house and works it's way back to the dress, car, and kitchen appliances which can only come from the same company that built the house.

I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.

The only free choice comes when you use commodity hardware with a Linux or Free/Open/Net BSD OS. Having a geek staff to build and maintain these are no more expensive than buying into the 'Who you gonna sue when it goes bad' thinking so it has to be corporate buys only. When is the last time anyone sued Microsoft successfully for causing millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity due to security flaws and buggy productivity tools?

Re:Uh...No.

[wattrlz]

I think the biggest problem with Vista is there is no compelling reason to upgrade for business users.

It's prettier. But that's about it.

Prettier seems to be a huge reason for most of the end user business customers I've known. Of course that's what IT departments are for, reigning in the baser instincts of management and end users vis-a-vis technology, but it's still been my experience that most people want the prettiest thing that still runs word and power point, utility be damned.

Re:Oh, yes, that's what we always say.

[SatanicPuppy]

No CIO will ever think that Linux looks like a good idea just because the latest Windows is still in the "unrunnable crap" phase. They don't get where they are by taking big risks, and jumping from windows to linux is enough to make anyone who has any experience break out in a cold sweat.

A migration from XP to Vista will bring with it a myriad of problems, hosts of issues, hours and hours of work...And that is the tip of the iceberg of what it would take to migrate their userbase from XP to Linux.

I've been involved in a good half-dozen attempts to move an all windows shop to an all Linux environment, and it always comes down to the same stuff. You may pry them off windows, but you won't pry them off their windows software, so either you have to put your trust in WINE (pause for laughter) or you have to invest heavily in windows terminal services so that you can run all the windows apps they need in a terminal session on their linux machines. Doing that will cause whole new levels of stress on your network, and it also throws up some new point of failure issues.

On top of all the technical crap, you're going to have massive training issues, and a lot of user resistance from people who want to be able to install stupid little desktop apps. Most of the IT staff won't be happy with you, because generally most of the staff won't be linux guys.

Even if you get it all running (and every time I've ever done one of these, we got it running, and well), you're still going to get resistance. It stays ugly for long periods of time...I've seen people roll back after two years, writing off a quarter million dollar system as a bad deal.

Until we get native software, it's going to be the deal-breaker. Selling the terminal services stuff to people doesn't fly all that well.

Re:The disconnect between developers...and everyon

[director_mr]

Perhaps in your specific instance it might make sense to let some of the staff switch over to Linux. But wholesale firing of half the company so that you can avoid emulating Linux seems a little unrealistic. I look forward to you presenting your well thought out plan to management and seeing how far they go with it. I also think your description of your support staff as a group of people that have let their skill set "elapse" because they focus on Windows technologies as odd. Your company has to hire its support staff from the same pool of labor that every other company in the US does. There aren't a whole lot of people running around with Linux certifications and with years of experience supporting it in a company. Things like that take years to happen at this point.

Maybe overhyped but...

[ledow]

The last school I worked at, we got a free volume license for XP or Vista Business (we could use either at any time and chop/change whenever we wanted without having to do anything - the school's licenses worked out that way), we had Vista Business media sent to us as part of our usual arrangements, we were Windows-only, we were revamping the network and basically would have started things from scratch (other problems got in the way but we were planning to take down and re-do the network from scratch over the summer).

We chose XP. It didn't even take a second's thought - we all just mutually agreed Vista wouldn't be worth the effort. We did do a small viability test to see what we'd been given for free and put it on a high-end machine etc. to test it. We couldn't find a single compelling reason to use it over XP and yet we found lots of reasons against - starting with "we don't know what it'll do, whether it'll run everything we need or what problems it will cause us - even after testing it" and going through to "it slows the machines down".

There was literally nothing. We had a network running only a handful of servers, transition would have been effortless because this was before we'd started imaging the machines for the next term and we just all agreed not to. T'aint broke, don't fix it. XP t'aint broke - and the parts that ARE broke weren't fixed in Vista. SP3 is around the corner. SP2 is good enough for our purposes. Vista didn't solve any problems that we had but would have introduced whole new problems that we wouldn't have had - starting with user-retraining - even in Classic settings, it works differently.

Our servers were mainly managed by batch scripts (yes, not even VB scripts) and a common piece of school computer management software. We didn't even bother to look up if they would work with Vista - the OS just didn't even get that far in our estimations. Plus, on the "non-kids" part of the school, we had just plain AD and logon script management. We could easily do Vista on one side, XP on another as they are physically seperate and don't need to be compatible. We didn't bother.

Where were the advantages? Any established network already has stuff in place which makes that all the stuff that Vista touts as features useless - they are all either permanently turned off or people use a better non-Microsoft replacment. For example, we turned all our XP machines to "classic" settings because it meant that we could keep another two "generations" (i.e. a full annual/termly purchase) of computers running at the same settings as the rest of the network at a reasonable pace. Without "classic" we would have had to upgrade or scrap two generations of machines because they wouldn't have been usable. With Vista, we were looking at moving on an extra two generations of PC's minimum - it was too expensive, even in "classic" mode. And to run it "as intended", we were looking closer to four generations.

There wasn't anything new to manage. Vista behaved the same under the management of a Server 2003 server as XP did. It was, to all intents and purposes, a heavier XP. There wasn't anything for the users, especially not after you bring it in line with XP-era performance. Maybe they could have used a handful of features at home but in a business you didn't want half of what it was trying to do.

Maybe if they'd released the next Windows Server at the same time - so that they worked and could be purchased, spec'ced, learned, managed and upgraded in tandem - it would be more of an enticement. As it is it's just a slow XP. With less drivers. And more nuisances.

When people that get Vista licenses literally FOR FREE with the way they purchase licenses and months later they still haven't done more than "curiosity" testing and still don't use your product, you have a problem. We don't get any expressions of surprise or attempts to push Vista when we order PC's in bulk and categorically specify "XP Pro pre-installed, drivers & licenses please, no Vista" on the

Re:Uh...No.

[peipas]

I would largely agree, but when studying for the TS in configuring vista, I did find one feature that would be beneficial to businesses: The separate sets of security settings for networking depending on if you are connected to a public or private network. That would be fantastic for better protecting mobile users. Still, that hardly by itself outweighs the cons.

Testing for the Air Force

[jesuscash]

I'm the lead on testing Vista at my base for the Air Force. I have to say that I would not give my advice to procede with a full deployment. However, my voice is meaningless as the Air Force has pretty much already decided to go ahead with it and seems to be doing this as a let's-see-what-breaks-and-mitigate. The sad issue is that MS contractors are hired on to key places. We are essentially paying them to sell us their products. I have literally been told by one of these people that something was not a bug but a feature. It's prettier but what does it offer my people? Our testing has fortunately prompted two people I talked to this weekend to buy Apples for their home use.

GG Vista

[Bengie]

Here's a good one. I work for It an my Uni and MS sent us a corporate version. It refuses to talk with their authentication server and locks itself down after 2 weeks. Our student labs already have Vista just because we need to use what most people are going to be use to, with all new computers shipping with it.

Re:XP was a different story...

[dave420]

No, XP threw up a whole host of compatibility issues, just as Vista is doing now. Vista will appear on more and more desktops as time goes on, just as XP did. The software vendors will have to update their sloppy code to work on Vista, and eventually we'll be were we were with XP when it was the de facto desktop OS.

And, btw, Vista does not have a huge learning curve - I picked it up in an afternoon, and I'm still searching for a reason to go back to XP. You can even make it run practically identical to XP by configuring a few options (if the computer is on an active directory, that can be done automatically).

Re:Uh...No.

[Geste]

I am not job hunting, but I still get emails and notices from recruiting companies. I don't unsubscribe myself from these notices as I find some of them interesting with respect to the types of projects that are going on.

Over the past 6 months, I have gotten a couple of emails about a project manager position and another contract position for a 1000+ desktop rollout planned for 2008 at "the world's largest aircraft company". I think I know who they are referring to. In Redmond's back yard.

The email says it is an XP rollout.

Re:Well there you have it

[Stamen]

...but if you are throwing out everything else anyway, why not go in favour of something that will at least save you money in terms of licensing and hardware requirements...

This is very true, and what I believe will be the long term result of Vista. It's not that it's horrible, it's merely ok, and it causes enterprises to change a lot of their infrastructure. Once you have accepted that your infrastructure will be changing, the cost of switching to an alternative is much easier to swallow. It's a catch 22 for Microsoft, they have to make changes to their OS to compete, but it gives people an excuse to switch. The answer, of course, it to make your new OS so great that when compared to the alternatives, there is no question which one to go with. Vista is only OK, and that isn't good enough.

As a developer I went through the same thing years ago. I specialized in COM (ActiveX), COM+, and the rest of their DNA stuff (which they had just rolled out); I mainly used Visual C++ and some Visual Basic. Then Microsoft announced .net, and everything that came before was going away; all the stuff, a year ago they were saying was the future. The point of this long story is, I was going to have to relearn everything, and because of that the price to switch platforms was equal to staying with Microsoft. At that time I switched to Java completely. That switch to Java gave me opportunity to switch to unix, which I did. Now I only use Windows when I have to.

This kind of think, IMHO, is going to happen to the IT people, like it did to so many of us developers back then.

Re:Microsoft is like an ex-wife

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I am constantly amazed with the people who flock to Apple when they do the same thing at the hardware level that Microsoft does at the software level and that is product line lock in.

Apple does tie their hardware and OS and it is a huge drawback to using their products. Of course if they didn't do it, they'd go out of business because they'd be directly competing with MS in the OS space, which given MS's ability to illegally leverage their monopoly is a losing proposition, regardless of the relative quality of the products. That said, aside from that one tie in, Apple doesn't do a lot to tie other products to their OS or computers. They work with standard compliant devices, connectors, APIs, protocols, etc. A lot of what they use is not the most popular, but for the most part it is open and can be implemented freely by others.

The only free choice comes when you use commodity hardware with a Linux or Free/Open/Net BSD OS.

For some people, freedom is not the only aspect they care about, nor even the most important. If I was building a corporate infrastructure today, from the ground up, I'd probably build it on Linux on the server and for most of the desktops, with Windows and OS X, where it made sense. When given a choice of which desktop to use personally, however, OS X is my first pick for the majority of tasks and if that means Apple hardware, so be it. Their hardware is top shelf and independently evaluated as among the most reliable and well made in the industry. I use Windows, Kubuntu, and OS X daily, and I can tell you, all the Linux distros I've used have significant work to do before they catch up to OS X, not just in overall functionality, but also in some important back end technologies (like openstep and system services). I'm not the only one who thinks so either. I know nearly 100 professional Linux an BSD developers who have switched to OS X on the desktop in the last few years and of all of them only one switched back. He did so not because he disliked using OS X, but because his hobby was a Linux desktop distro and he did not like dual booting all the time.

Maybe another thing to think about is not everyone objects to non-free software. I, personally have no problem with closed source software made for pay. It is the business model with the best results in some software markets. I don't object to MS because they use tying and bundling and closed source. I object to them because they use tying and bundling with a product they have monopolized, and thus undercut free market forces and hinder innovation. If MS was split in two and both companies had all the rights to Windows, I'd have no objection to them continuing to bundle and use nonstandard protocols and tie products because the market would sort it out and the best product would win. I object to it now because they artificially force a lot of us to use the worse product in order to interoperate with everyone else.