83% of Businesses Won't Bother With Windows 7 545
Olipro writes "Most enterprises stated they won't bother with Windows 7 for at least a year as they simply continue to distrust that compatibility issues won't occur with their mission-critical software ... The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing." I suspect that will change before they actually release the OS.
xp does the job well (Score:5, Insightful)
As to the last line of the post... (Score:5, Insightful)
...MS hasn't often demonstrated an ability to make major functioning software improvements at the last minute. I suppose we'll see, though.
Dubious (Score:5, Insightful)
recession vs. windows tax (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft now has to battle the recession as well as Linux. So now the PHB's finally have an argument they understand -- salaries vs. upgrades.
Re:they will if they don't want to pay for support (Score:3, Insightful)
Distrust? What about testing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most enterprises stated they won't bother with Windows 7 for at least a year as they simply continue to distrust that compatibility issues won't occur with their mission-critical software...
First off, whoever edited that sentence needs to get a clue-by-four -- "distrust that issues won't occur" is just terrible English.
About the content, why would any IT person ever have to resort to "trust" anyone for their software compatibility? You'd almost think they can't grab a VM image of Windows7 and test their software to see if there are compatibility issues.
If I were a CIT and someone came up to me with this dribble, I would tell them to build a testbed and actually report on compatibility issues, possible savings, and so forth. Windows 7 probably won't be worth the money but deciding that before you actual evaluate it is madness.
This is normal (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been working in software development for 35 years. No company I've ever worked at jumps on new versions of Windows, they all have a policy of waiting at least until SP1 regardless of whether its an improvement or not.
The only news here is that the figure is that 17% might move straight away. From my own experiences I would have thought nearly all, if not all companies would wait at least a year.
Businesses are cautious: News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released? Guess what guys: Businesses tend to be conservative by nature, and aren't going to do a massive upgrade without a good plan. For any reasonably large business, it will take several months to certify all of their internal software with any new OS release, not to mention the actual time it takes to execute the switch. They would be saying the same thing if you asked them when they would be switching from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6.
The norm? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most enterprises stated they won't bother with Windows 7 for at least a year
Well, seriously, how often do business environments run a brand new version of Windows? I don't work in IT, but I'm going to go with almost never. This doesn't sound very special.
Re:Huh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:xp does the job well (Score:5, Insightful)
Security? Although software doesn't wear out, one must keep updated against the newest vulnerabilities.
Perhaps Microsoft should consider adopting a six months interval between updates, like Ubuntu does. That would make for less marketing glitter, since updates would become trivial happenings, but would also make for less traumatic failures.
KDE 4 was a terrible mistake, but it's no big deal, we don't need Ubuntu 8.10, just keep 8.04 and wait for 9.04, or 9.10, or whatever update will have a usable KDE.
No kidding (Score:3, Insightful)
Most companies don't like spending money just for the sake of spending money, they have XP in the enterprise right now, and it works, and it doesnt require machine upgrades either. there is no compelling reason to make the switch.
A Clean Install Is Very Crafty (Score:5, Insightful)
Often, that clean install makes for a much faster system after years of cruft building up on a system.
Although there may be compatibility issues, MS making a clean install mandatory might be one of the most clever marketing tools they've had in a while. Then again, it could backfire.
Word of mouth from those who migrate and see how fast a clean build of Win7 is vs XP might breathe new life into the Windows brand.
Re:xp does the job well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if this questionnaire took into account businsses that got Vista. Most likely these companies will not upgrade at all since they just spent a ton of money on Vista. This article is flawed and fails to be news. Wait, it's anti-MS bashing so it is news here.
If software/hardware companies want more early adopters they need to offer substantial discounts. For example "Be the first 25,000 to order our stuff within the first three months and get 50% off software, and 15% off hardware". That will get you more early adopters.
Re:As to the last line of the post... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not improvements businesses want, its stuff that works with the stuff they've got. Who cares about running a new OS if the old one still works, and the new one would cost you for the new OS but also new hardware, new versions of your existing software (if its available).
Some businesses moved to Vista and found that MSs plans to drop backwards compatibility (in favour of new .NET everything) meant lots of applications stopped working. I think this is a big reason why they're very cautious this time, and also why XP is the 'top of the pile' as generally it tried to keep that backward compatibility going as much as possible.
Buzz words removed, non-story (Score:4, Insightful)
Most PEOPLE stated they won't TRY A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM for A year BECAUSE THEY THINK IT won't WORK with their software...
Re:Of course.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to respectfully disagree. Once you install SP1 and disable UAC, the OS is quite usable. It actually performs better than XP in some areas.
Thats the thing though, its not usable by default. Anyone who buys a new computer at Best Buy and gets Vista ends up with UAC and a nearly unusable computer. Being mostly computer illiterate save for surfing the web and checking e-mail, they don't really know how to fix it. So they know its Vista, know that its a new computer so it should be faster then their aging Pentium 4 with XP, but when its not they know who to blame: MS and Vista. Sure, Vista can be made usable, but the fact that it isn't by default shows a lack of planning by MS.
Re:Huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
In comparison Windows XP is more similar to Windows 2000 (and Windows XP in "classic mode" is vey similar).
Actually now would be a great time for a Windows XP compatible operating system.
If someone could come up with a decent Windows XP compatible O/S, Microsoft could lose significant market share. Might get even more interesting if it supports DirectX 10
Re:No kidding (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of course.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Once you install SP1 and disable UAC
Surely, once you disable UAC, much of the reason for upgrading from XP has vanished.
Re:They don't have a choice (Score:5, Insightful)
This is, of course, precisely the reason so many big companies still use COBOL [slashdot.org], right?
Legacy is a powerful force in industry. It is often perceived that the cost of maintaining the old systems is less than the cost of replacing it, especially when you consider compatibility, debugging, reliability, down time, retraining, infrastructure upgrades, policy changes, etc. etc.
Here's your choice: Stick with what you have. Although it can be a real pain in the ass, at least you're used to it after all these years and can handle the quirks to keep things running. OR you can spend a whole lot of money to scrap everything and start over with a totally new setup that's one big question mark all around, especially when the vendor's reputation is losing ground.
Questionable surveying methods aside, it is not difficult to imagine companies aren't too keen to jump on board.
XP is old. And MS would love to retire it, but the industry is getting fed up with their shenanigans. The individual homeowner might not have the purchasing power to hurt them, but big companies with thousands of licenses do - MS will either give them what they want (which is, apparently, XP) or they will lose the customers.
=Smidge=
Enterprises don't do the upgrade install (Score:4, Insightful)
Only idiots and consumers do actual upgrades. Any self-respecting enterprise makes their own images and deploys them, complete with apps.
Re:I've worked out the answer to MS's problem! (Score:3, Insightful)
The new Microsoft Amazingly Open And Genuine Public License allows you complete freedom to use, modify and redistribute the software provided that every copy comes with a DVD of Windows Vista Ultimate, you acknowledge that Microsoft's FAT patent protects a remarkable and valuable innovation in computer science and all accompanying documentation is in OOXML. Also, all your data belongs to Microsoft.
The overwhelming dominance of Microsoft was assured, he said, pointing to their success in paying netbook manufacturers to use Windows XP and paying US retailers not to stock the Linux versions of the computers. "We're also enforcing our patent on right-clicking. And on the number seven."
I'm having difficulty telling the difference between satire and the news these days. Doesn't seem too far off here.
Re:Doesn't require clean install (Score:1, Insightful)
I've always done clean installs. Upgrade installs have never worked well, so why are people hell bent on doing them?
Re:xp does the job well (Score:5, Insightful)
In who's interest is this ? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference between what is good for the IT market and what is good for business in general. Us IT crowd want to push the latest new thing, for some this means mark up on s/ware, others it is more consultancy. What a business wants is a stable IT system that does what the business needs in a stable way -- boring, not sexy. Once applications are written they stay written; the will be changed when the business requirements change, not because the computer systems change.
MS is also caught up in the sales/upgrades treadmill - to not do so would badly damage its bottom line. What is in the best interests of MS is not in the best interests of its customers.
Linux is based on 35+ years old Unix, I regularly use programs that are essentially unchanged since I wrote them for System V Unix 25 years ago. How old a system is is not an issue unless you need to make money by flogging your customers new versions. In this regard Unix/Linux is a better platform for companies than MS Windows systems.
Re:Huh. (Score:5, Insightful)
As an IT Manager for a small company, I have no reason to move off of XP. Until I am forced, I will not migrate to Vista or 7. There just is no compelling reason to do so. More and more I seek to take functionality AWAY from the desktop.
I suspect that I am going to get karmically beaten up for this, but here goes...
People keep trying to move applications from the desktop to the web. In many cases, the web is the right medium for those apps. In most though, its not. My general rule of thumb is this: When trying to develop something as a web app, if you find that you are trying to reproduce desktop app behavior, you are doing the wrong thing.
Eventually, we are going to have to pay the piper (in terms of maintenance cost) for web apps with all the convoluted hacks necessary to make them look and feel like desktop apps. Let's start collectively applying some common sense - the web when its the right thing, and the desktop where it fits best.
Re:xp does the job well (Score:3, Insightful)
Security is only an issue of there is exposure.
Sufficiently locked down and inaccessible to the outside world, even an XP machine can be made safe.
Re:xp does the job well (Score:5, Insightful)
Because XP will stop being supported with the release of Windows 7.
Maybe it depends on your definition of being supported, but Microsoft is going to provide security updates for Windows XP until 2014.
Then Microsoft will stop pushing all new copies of XP and accidentally invalidate all "genuine" XP keys.
Can you provide a citation for that? Or is it just mindless BS spouted out by the "M$" haters?
Re:xp does the job well (Score:3, Insightful)
Because XP will stop being supported with the release of Windows 7
I don't throw something out only because it is out of production or its warranty is expired. I at least wait until it is broken beyond repair.
Then all the internal unfixed bug sheets of XP will be reported and published in China, Russia, and wherever Conficker came from.
This is more scary, but unless those bugs include something that would allow remote code execution even if I have a firewall, then I don't really care. Also, someone may release a patch (like it happened with the WMF vulnerability).
Then Microsoft will stop pushing all new copies of XP and accidentally invalidate all "genuine" XP keys.
Without updates there is no point in having "genuine" Windows, and the notifications are easy to crack (for now the whole validation can be cracked unless M$ adds if OS='XP' then valid:=false; to their code).
Re:Huh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're talking about data intensive apps like video editing, DTP and the like, most business software is incredibly mundane. The vast majority of cubicle dwellers do not need anything more than a well designed web app. Data entry hardly requires a fat client.
Re:xp does the job well (Score:1, Insightful)
Then Microsoft will stop pushing all new copies of XP and accidentally invalidate all "genuine" XP keys.
What kind of paranoid rambling is this?
Not even Microsoft would survive the tsnumani of lawsuits that would ensue should they ever do something so stupid.
Re:Businesses are cautious: News at 11 (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't this basically the exact same story Slashdot ran before Windows Vista was released?
Your point being that Vista was a rousing success?
There's no case for spending the money (Score:3, Insightful)
The real issue is money. There's no real business case for upgrading business PCs. Really, any machine built in the last ten years has enough CPU power to run most business applications. Even big spreadsheets. At most, a RAM upgrade might be useful. Face it, Windows 7 is a minor improvement over Windows XP. The last major upgrade was from Windows 9x to Windows 2000, a decade ago. Most business apps run just fine on Windows 2000, which still has significant usage in the business community. (You run Windows 2000; it's not a slave to Redmond's remote updates like XP and later. Some businesses like that.)
We're in a major recession. Business activity is down. Nobody is expanding, adding employees or customers at a high rate. So where's the need for more compute power?
A real upgrade would be a transition to an all 64-bit world, or IPv6 by default, or an OS with security good enough that "zombies" never happened. But Microsoft isn't delivering anything like that. Windows 7 is a yawner. It doesn't even have many of the features originally promised for Vista, like the relational file system. So why upgrade?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They don't have a choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the comparison is rather apt. You have a system that they are reluctant to replace. A good deal of those COBOL systems still run on 70's era hardware, although advances in virtualization are helping there a lot.
The industry has no choice since they cannot force MS to supply XP. What if MS doesn't?
How many times has MS buckled under industry pressure to keep offering XP already? At least twice, but I haven't really been counting. They might do it in an indirect manner ("downgrades") but they only do that to obscure how many people are actually buying their latest product.
If they don't? There might be a lawsuit in there somewhere. Moving to *nix is one possible alternative: If a company will be FORCED to change their *anything*, why would they so readily go with the vendor that just screwed them over? The hurdle is getting them to change at all - once you're past that there is no guarantee they'll change to what you want.
Especially if their applications aren't compatible. If Win7 isn't backwards compatible with applications and drivers written for XP, they'll have to rewrite everything... and at that point they could pretty easily rewrite it for any other platform.
The industry can't force MS to supply XP, but MS can't force the industry to use Win7 either. MS can give their biggest customers what they want or lose them as customers, just like they have been doing. MS will offer XP until there are so few XP users left they can afford to flip them off entirely. NT 4 was supported until three years ago. 2000 is going to be supported until at least the end of 2010. Windows 3.1 was supported up until last November - lasted over 16 years.
Also, one key problem here is the phrase "better tech" - is Vista really better than XP? In ways that businesses really care about? "Newer" is not a synonym for "better."
=Smidge=
Re:Huh.... and the same can be said for,,, (Score:5, Insightful)
One could also say, " don't know how most businesses are run, but around these parts, XP works, and works well." followed by, "we don't need the features of Linux [or Mac OS X or insert your favorite OS here])". This is part of the problem with getting alternative OS adoption.
The name change backfired? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a lot of threads about corporate users not upgrading until SP1 is out - an agreed good thing.
However - and please correct me if I'm wrong - I believe that Windows 7 is the name of the great big fix to Vista and that furthermore, the name was changed from Vista to Windows 7 to avoid the bad taste, as "proven" by Mojave.
Now, if I have my history and nomenclature correct, Win7 is really some flavor of VistaX and if so named would have by-passed the SP1 adoption rule. The catch is that the Vista name was sullied by bad performance (or defects, whatever).
So, the real problem in my opinion isn't that Win7 is new - it's that it's the waited-for corrected Vista, but because of their own shenanigans, they can't win: the Vista name is poison, a "brand new" Win7.
FWIW, they could just take a page from Apple's playbook when their time comes: scrap their OS, use some *nix variant as a core - say.... Linux? - and then layer their own GUI on top of it. This was a highly successful strategy resulting in a market-acceptable product for Apple, and I am being NEITHER a fanboy nor catcalling when I suggest surprise that MS is NOT copying this approach yet.
(Just to save us all some time - I'm well-documented hereabouts as being a supporter and critic of both MS and Apple, so props in advance for not putting me in some narrow category when reading this post or replying to it. A few days ago, I praised MS, today I'm dising them.)
Re:Huh. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't go as far as to say it's undeserved. I understand that a lot of the more flagrant bugs have now been squished, but when it first came out it was a godawful piece of shit, and everybody knew it. That kind of dirt tends to stick, and no-one should be surprised if people are reluctant to get bitten again.
Windows 7 may well be a great product (I don't care one way or another, I'm not in their market) but most people will view it with suspicion for a while. Its acceptance will probably be driven by the OEM market, as was Vista's.
Re:Huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Hardware costs (servers/pcs)
2) Migration Costs
3) Down time for upgrades
4) Application Testing costs (did Adobe make sure they are 100% compliant with Win7? This includes older versions)
5) Software costs (Will they have to buy Office 2007, or a new version or cant they stick with Office 2003. Will they have to buy a new version of Adobe, Norton AntiVirus, MS
6) Tech Support availability - Does MS have lots of staff well-versed in handling potential issues. Does your vendor offer tech support? Does your own staff offer it?
So far I just named you six potential, and major, issues right off the top of my head. None of these are "trust" related (as far as MS products are concerned).
Other issue, that is more MS concerned, patches. 300,000 testers in limited environments is not as good as 3MM investors in enterprise environments. Now you have malicious hackers you need to concern yourself with who are looking for vulnerabilities and implementing them.
Just because companies held off on Vista does not mean they will not upgrade to 7. It isn't a lack of trust with MS it is a lack of trust in a new product and most companies avoid getting the latest and greatest of ANY product until it has the equivelant of an SP1
Re:The answer is 'no' (Score:3, Insightful)
>> The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing.
> The Million Dollar answer is "no". Because when you upgrade a corporate desktop, you don't upgrade in place. You create an image and you reimage your desktops en masse.
Whereupon: 1. You discover all the hidden defects in your backup system. Users start to line up outside your office asking where their data is/went. Extra anguish is demonstrated by [...]
Wow, does your organization really operate this way? Over here, we purchase standardized desktops and laptops. "Developers" get one type of laptop, "managers" and "Project managers" get a different tier of laptop .. some older users whose systems haven't come up for replacement may still run the "powerhouse" desktop we used to issue. When our desktop support folks upgraded the OS on my laptop, they simply (arranged a time, then) took away my old laptop, and immediately replaced it with a "new" laptop (of the same class) with the upgraded OS.
They give me 2-5 days for "uh oh" discovery ("hey, I guess I had this file on my old laptop..") then securely erase my old hard drive, and re-image it to give to someone else.
Since we have a standardized platform, it's fairly straightforward for the desktop support group to test new versions of the software or operating system (say, Windows 7) to make sure all the devices work. With a standardized platform - even taking system replacement every 3-4 years - there are only so many configs you can have. I'm not saying testing takes a day - it may take months - but it's not that hard to figure out if everyone has pretty much the same system.
Most corporate shops run in a similar way. I doubt any of them will "upgrade in place". They'll just issue a new image to users running Windows 7, if and when they choose to upgrade to Win7.
Re:Huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
True enough, but you also need to look at how it's deployed. If you have an internal-only web app, then maintenance is simply keeping your servers running. In the long run it can be cheaper because it becomes possible to replace fat clients with thin ones, or simply not having to upgrade existing hardware. But the main advantage isn't really cost, it's really about easier management (backups, archiving, updates, etc ...)
Re:Huh. (Score:3, Insightful)
And people said Vista added nothing significantly new to XP, and people said XP added nothing significantly new to Win2k.
So why the hell is Windows 7 so different from Win2k? By Slashdot logic, they should be practically indistinguishable.
Re:xp does the job well (Score:4, Insightful)
Your comment actually reinforces the parent post. Manufacturers are more likely to support new hardware on older windows versions than old hardware on newer windows versions so it pays to stick on an old version of windows for a while.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)