Gartner Tells Businesses to Forget About Vista 309
Barence writes "IT analyst firm Gartner has told businesses to skip Vista and prepare to roll out Windows 7. Companies have traditionally been advised to wait until the first Service Pack of an operating system arrives before considering migration. However, Gartner is urging organisations that aren't already midway through Vista deployments to give the much-maligned operating system a miss. 'Preparing for Vista will require the same amount of effort as preparing for Windows 7, so at this point, targeting Windows 7 would add less than six months to the schedule and would result in a plan that is more politically palatable, better for users, and results in greater longevity.' Even businesses that are midway through planning a Vista migration are urged to consider scrapping the deployment. 'Consider switching to Windows 7 if it would delay deployment by six months or less.'"
Re:Gartner (Score:2, Informative)
/., please stop posting these stupid Gartner reports.
Moderated story -1. SPAMBIN
Re:tell me again... (Score:4, Informative)
An upgrade to Windows 7 from XP brings a lot more than people think for businesses:
BitLocker + a TPM means that a laptop theft basically becomes "just" a hardware theft, as opposed to hardware + data on it. A cost of a laptop is chump change compared to the revenue loss and loss of PR face when having to report that sensitive data was stolen to shareholders, the SEC, customers, and the press. BitLocker can also be used on workstations so a redeployment or sale of machines can be done without trashing the hard disks. Just a format command will do the job. (Vista's format.exe command explicitly overwrites the volume master key sectors, ensuring that recovery of any data even with a copy of the recovery info isn't going to happen.)
A decent privilege model. Apps shouldn't demand admin or LocalSystem rights unless they need it. No, this isn't a magic bullet for security, but it is a great step in the right direction. XP also has this, but most developers still just write assuming that all users are in the Administrator's group.
BitLocker To Go = those tons of USB flash drives are at least protected with some type of password that users write to (assuming the policy to require it before writing is allowed is set.) If user loses the password, the data is still recoverable.
Better OS imaging. WIM is a lot more customizable than XP's imaging model. The only exception is the fact that even VLK editions of Vista require activation which make this a major thorn in the side of businesses, even with an internal KMS. You can make multiple corporate images and images can be used across CPU/HAL architectures, as opposed to having a specific image for a certain model Dell, another image for the HPs, and so on. Add some PXE support, and you can reimage a new or trashed machine with just a boot from the network, as opposed to the Ghost CD and an external hard disk.
There are a number of under the hood things that Vista has that people don't notice which do improve security and reliability. ASLR, multiple privilege levels (like how IE8 runs in a pseudo-jail), background checking of disk filesystem integrity, volume snapshots, disassociation of Windows Update from Internet Explorer, and a good number of other security improvements.
The activation issue is, in my personal experience, the second biggest reason why businesses stay with XP, the first being the issue of legacy drivers that don't work under Vista. I just don't get the point of activation in VLK editions. The BSA will rip a business to component atoms who is caught pirating, so activation doesn't ensure MS gets any more revenue than it does already in the business sector.
Samba support (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:3, Informative)
Not exactly sure what you meant by this. Windows NT was around long before ME. I thought, maybe you meant Windows 2000. I was pretty sure that ME and 2000 were released around the same time. Nope. According to wikipedia, Win2000 came out in February 2000, while ME came a full 7 months later in September. So... what exactly did you mean?
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:5, Informative)
That's relative. Their stock value [yahoo.com], currently around $20, never again reached their peak of $60 after 2000.
Their cash reserves [seattlepi.com] aren't what they used to be, they spent two thirds of it trying to shore up the stock price, without result.
Their revenues [microsoft-watch.com] are dropping through the floor.
It's a huge company that won't disappear so soon, but if you pay $40 billion in dividends and still have so much problem to get the stock price back to 30% of the peak [yahoo.com]...
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:4, Informative)
MS ported most of the important stuff (plug and play and support for a common driver model between the two lines to help hardware manufacturs transition) to the NT line with 2K but bottled out of pushing 2K to home/small buisness users and produced another version of the 9x line instead.
So when ME flopped it wasn't a huge deal, they just added a home edition to the next minor release of the NT line and scrapped 9x. While 2K/XP was slower than 9x it was a noticable improvement in terms of both stability and ability to handle lots of windows open at once.
Re:Gartner (Score:5, Informative)
Try it yourself then.
I've used it long enough to get a feel for the OS, and would say it's not bad. Certainly feels better than Vista, but not as good as a well-sorted XP install.
That's the main problem with 7 - it doesn't change anything significant about using a computer. It won't make your life easier or your work more productive. Sure there are some minor enhancements, but nothing you can't get on XP with a few freeware apps, and is is definitely more sluggish on the same hardware than XP.
So in exchange for your couple of hundred dollars and a mandatory hardware upgrade, you get a whole lot of... not much at all, really.
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:4, Informative)
theyve been down this road before. the clones were nothing good, and almost caused apple to fail.
those who dont know history...
They're improving their value prop (Score:4, Informative)
Now you can't get a lot of their more exciting offerings like Server 2008 Datacenter edition unless you buy SA. Which means if you don't buy SA, you have to buy a separate copy of Server 2008 for each virtual machine you might run. And you can only transfer the license every 30 days, so if your cluster fails over you have to wait a month before you fail back, and run your cluster in non-redundant mode for that month. So the non-SA versions of Server 2008 are crippleware because they can't do HA. Way to sell product by subscription! These reality enhanced individuals have no idea what their competition is doing to their value proposition. And even if you buy into that they only support VMs that run Windows and their Novell Linux lapdog, SUSE SLED. Ubuntu? Redhat? Mandrake? Oracle Unbreakable Linux? BSD? Debian? Never heard of that stuff.
For those who are paying attention, Software Assurance is the incredible deal where you pay Microsoft every year 1/3 the price of their full software stack and in return you get to use the useful upgrades they come out with every twelve years for FREE. Isn't proprietary licensing great? There are other rules too. You wouldn't believe what obscure rules in the license agreement these tards pulled up when they were trying to drive Ernie Ball [stumbleupon.com] out of business. What they got instead is that he paid them, deleted their software, and became a Linux fan [cnet.com].
Suing your customers [sco.com] isn't the best way to win friends and influence people.
Re:tell me again... (Score:3, Informative)
Clear Type font rendering.