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.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:5, Interesting)
MS is swimming in money. On the other hand, they keep losing mindshare to Apple left and right.
Real Insight: Microsoft is also skipping Vista. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? Likely, the number of Windows-XP users is substantially larger than the number of Vista users. Sheer profit motivates Microsoft management to pursue the larger market: Windows-XP users.
Re:Gartner (Score:3, Interesting)
Then why are they suggesting that businesses avoid Vista and cancel existing transitions to Vista? That doesn't sound like a Microsoft party line to me.
Re:Gartner (Score:4, Interesting)
They're not suggesting that. They're TELLING people to stop sticking with XP, and spend money on Windows 7. Microsoft cut its losses on Vista a long time ago, but obviously had to keep up some pretense that it was really a good product, and doing well. Their main goal for a long time has been to get Windows 7 out in some sort of more-acceptable-than-vista state (which they seem to have failed at), and to make sure people buy it this time, which they're attempting to ensure with extra PR, and the usual highly questionable tactics like this Gartner thing.
Re:So - Why would I upgrade to Windows 7 Over XP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know anymore about a company that wont disappear soon...
I have been thinking quite a bit about this and the one thing that could REALLY do major damage is the fabled Apple Tablet.
Up to this point Apple has been gaining market share, by building new markets for itself. Point to Apple.
But this netbook thing I think is here to stay and we have not seen the end of that design. Thus if Apple were to bring onto market an Apple Tablet in the netbook range then people would seriously look at that device.
I don't have an iBook (had one several years ago). Write code for the most part using Windows and .NET. But I have an iPod Touch and Apple has made some nice revenue from my buying of music and apps.
Now if they were to bring onto market a Tablet I would be client number 1 because right now I want an easy to use tablet to surf my information. Yes I have a Windows Tablet, but Vista sucks big time.
And this raises another point. If Apple puts in a stake in the netbook market how much longer will companies like HP wait and beg for scraps from Apple? They will go scurrying to Apple for anything because they don't want to risk landing in the abyss...
And I am sure that Steve Jobs would just love to stick a stake into Microsoft for the decades of damage Microsoft caused...
Thus I do think if something like this happened, Microsoft VERY QUICKLY would go the way of the Dodo...
Disclosure: I write programs using .NET and that would put a crimp in lifestyle...
Re:So - Why would I upgrade to Windows 7 Over XP? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an ongoing question. I was forced to explain the reason for going to XP (migration done this year!) from 2000. Since migrating, I think we have only had one or two BSOD's - and a quick BIOS upgrade fixed that (we are an HP shop, BTW). Sure I mean there was no real technical reason to upgrade, as most of our users use apps and not the OS features anyways. But I am convinced that but not upgrading, you end up like we did - an old OS trying to run on modern hardware, which was becoming a support nightmare trying to explain why their PC would BSOD three or four times a day.
So I'm not the only one who noticed problems with Windows 2000 on new hardware.
My current PC (built from components in 2007) was never quite stable under Windows 2000. I suspect that the hardware vendors had stopped caring at that point and did no real QA on the Windows 2000 drivers anymore. For the MSI graphics card (a NVidia 8600 GT), only an obsolete Windows 2000 driver version was offered at all. A switch to XP fixed the problems.
On the other hand, my older Pentium IV is quite stable under Windows 2000.
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think the issue with lots of windows on 9x was a multitasking issue per-se (afaict the issue would happen regardless of whether all the windows were created by the same app/thread or not) but an issue with win9x still relying on some 16-bit GDI stuff and running out of GDI resources.
What a load of BS (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, but this *really* irritates me. These people appear to have reverse Alheimers: good short term memory and zero long term. But I haven't (more the reverse, so I may post this twice :-)).
This is BS as it depends on two unmentioned assumptions:
1 - businesses actually need anything more/newer than XP. Well, MS has been postponing the end of support a few times now because people would either not move to Vista or move to Linux which would REALLY be unacceptable because they wouldn't come back after sinking that one-off cost. Granted, Vista has apparently introduced some features that may help in the future, but MS has now learned that there is only so much beta, sorry, alpha testing the buying public will accept. And business has learned it doesn't actually NEED the repeated pain of migration, even if MS says so. You could say the racket is up, in almost the same way as the use of expenses by UK MPs.
2 - somehow, Windows 7 will be better than Vista and not the disaster that Vista was. Well, we're back to business as usual then: the PROMISE of improvement. The eternal promise that has allowed MS to make a profit ever since they discovered with MS-DOS that people would pay for upgrades as long as it fixed something or looked different. The issue is that, here too, Vista has given that promise viability a serious dent. Well, without some volume deployment you will not find out where they screwed up this time, put another way, leave that all important hook to sell you the NEXT version. So that report is concluding something without any factual basis.
Well, I think XP will be installed here a little while longer. And when supports ends it's a question if it will be Windows again. It could be Linux (some retraining required) or OSX (hardware costs, and not enough depth behind the interface - we`d like the control ourselves, Jobs, thanks). And OpenOffice, as I rather lose productivity once at the start of the day to start it up than the whole day because I have to figure out where they put all the functionality in Office 2007. If the argument for not moving to Linux is "that it looks different" I would be intrigued to see how Office 2007 was defended.
Oh, and Gartner? Well, that doesn't need much more discussion now, does it?
Here's your migration path: (Score:2, Interesting)
MicroXP as an OS. Blazingly fast, runs on old hardware, is backwards compatible with 99% of your current application needs.
Then replace all your applications with:
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable [portableapps.com]
and the like.
Then as you weed out the last apps that require Windows, switch to Linux Mint, and never pay for software or get locked into a corporations dying gasps ever again.
Re:Insightful analysis... four years late. (Score:2, Interesting)
Heck, MS has more feet then that. They shot themselves in the foot with Windows ME too, luckily for them they had the reasonably stable Windows NT ready to go out the door.
They shot themselves in the foot with MS-DOS 4.0 an nobody even blinked. They released MS-DOS 5.0 and everybody just flocked around it.