Most Companies Won't Deploy Windows 7 — Survey 429
angry tapir writes "Nearly six in 10 companies have no current plans to deploy Windows 7 by the end of next year, according to a new survey. Of 1,100 IT administrators who responded to the survey, 59.3 percent said they didn't have a plan to deploy Windows 7. (Full results, PDF.)"
I almost pity Microsoft. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's got to be tough. You can't kill off XP like you want to, because people really really might leave. But it looks foolish to support that morass of code in spite of the NEW morass you've spent all that money on.
In the long run, they'll switch. Until everything becomes a webapp, the ecosystem almost demands it. Here's hoping people realize webapps are where it's at, for most things.
Still using IE6 (Score:5, Interesting)
We still have IE6 installed by default at work. The reason we haven't upgraded is because it'd break some of the applications and they don't want the headache of having to retest the application (that's the excuse anyway), so we're stuck with it.
I expect we won't be moving to Windows 7 any time soon either, XP works fine and not only would they have to spend money on the upgrade, but they'd have to re-train everyone.
So more than 4 out of 10 companies are switching? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm all for bashing ms but this sounds like a pretty big number to me.
Re:Why would they? (Score:1, Interesting)
The only reason I see that companies would pay for a substantial cost in upgrade is to appease the employees. If employees are happy they work more efficiently. If I was running a company I would wait until Windows 7 comes out and switch over a couple of first adapters with a warning that they may have problems. I would make the decision after I get feedback from them and an overall water cooler talk.
Re:I wouldnt make plans to deploy it either (Score:2, Interesting)
> If 7 Manages everything it promises, im sure plenty will turn to 7 in the end
What does it promise that businesses need and don't have?
no surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not a bash at MS. It is just prudent IT policy, and good business not to use untested software in mission critical environments. No new OS, from anyone, is guaranteed to be mission critical in its first year of release.
Most business do not upgrade entire systems often. There's plenty that have only switched to XP from 200 in the past 5 years.
There's plenty of bespoke programs and macros that run on every enterprise system. It takes at least a year to figure out how a new OS will work with those. That's not even counting driver issues, hardware issues, and bugs.
Plus there's a productivity issue with switching OS. Do you really want to slow down your staff during a recession?
But specifically for Windows 7, why switch? What is the competitive advantage of doing so? There's no real performance gain. There's no real new features that aren't just bling. Sure, it's a bit more secure, but any IT dept has cobbled something together and locked down XP enough for it to work reasonably well.
No, sorry, I'd have to question the business decision of any company that is going to introduce a new OS that will cost them money, productivity, and still have kinks and bugs in it at this early stage in its release.
In 3-5 years, after much internal testing, sure it would make sense. But right now -- corporate suicide.
Re:Why would they? (Score:5, Interesting)
I must be getting older.
It doesn't matter what they call it, it's still not as fast, and with a small a footprint as XP?
I remember saying the same thing about XP in regards to Windows 2000... "It's exactly the same, but with a lego-land interface, and a firewall that won't let you use the apps you want, but allows all the viruses in. It's bloated and slow. I want nothing to do with it if I can avoid it."
Then XP SP2 came out: "Well, it's still bloated, but with new hardware it's not bad... At least we can make exceptions to allow our apps to access the network finally. Too bad it has double the footprint of SP1."
Funny how Vista (and a few years) changed our perspective so much... Because it was such a resource hog, it made XP seem tiny.
Re:I almost pity Microsoft. (Score:3, Interesting)
Slow down cowboy. I make a good living writing webapps so if anyone should want everything to be delivered as a webapp it should be me but I just don't see it happening in the near future. On paper there is nothing stopping it from happening, we've been down the thin client road before and some of the new webapps are very feature rich. In reality though I think we will hit many of the same problems thin clients did. In fact in many respects I think we are starting from a worse position because network latency is much higher over the Internet than it is over a local network. Combine that with the fact that all the applications are developed in Javascript and presented through a multitude of browsers and you have a difficult target to hit.
Long live the desktop application!
Where's the business case? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-microsofts-red-headed-stepchild-075?page=0,1&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-07-13 [infoworld.com]
From the article ...
"I recently spoke with an IT manager who was budgeting for an Office 2010 upgrade from Office 2003. I casually asked him what features he had deemed important enough to justify a $100,000 budget item. He thought for a minute and admitted that he couldn't think of a single one. So I asked the logical follow-up: Why are you buying it? He had no answer for that either. The $100,000 line item disappeared. He's also sticking with XP."
Re:Still using IE6 (Score:3, Interesting)
Our company is the same way. There are one or two legacy applications (nothing I wrote, mind you, third party stuff) that require IE6. They won't work with IE7, IE8, or FireFox. So we're waiting on the vendors before we can upgrade IE. I'm thinking of recommending that we upgrade to IE7 or IE8, however, and set up those people that need IE6 with Xenocode's IE6 sandbox ( http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ [xenocode.com] ).
Re:I wouldnt make plans to deploy it either (Score:3, Interesting)
Thinking 'bout it... (and sorry for the selfreply), when did anything MS say, promise, do or deliver have anything to do with the upgrade cycles your management decides for? It's more like "the computers are exactly 3 years, 2 months and 1 day old, time for change. BING! Now!"
No real rhyme or reason, other than that the beancounters said it would be a good idea to blow a few quid on new IT crap because the stars are aligned and the write off oracle agrees...
My company won't be buying Windows 7 (Score:2, Interesting)
Simply because we're switching the entire fleet of computers to Mac systems. A lot more reliable, a lot less expensive, a lot easier to manage.
No flame to Dell or Microsoft intended but their tandem has been biting the company in the behind for quite a while whether it be annoyingly small issues (roaming profiles not syncing correctly) or larger issues like virus outbreaks (even with full commercial anti-virus software), data loss when using SMB and the worse-than-awful support from Dell.
Re:So in 3 months (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's be fair - it's not even out yet, and who knows what kind of reception that it will get. Why would they already start planning to deploy something that they haven't even seen yet? Would they base their decision-making off the RC? Sure....
It's too early for them to look at. While XP still has a long time to receive support, most IT dept's are just going to wait and see. Besides, no one wants to be the first to try it in a corporate environment. They'll want to see how it goes with other companies too, for sure.
Re:I wouldnt make plans to deploy it either (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to believe that PC upgrades are probably the first thing on the chopping block when it comes to hard times. My experience with the federal government is that computer upgrades don't just happen every few years like they used to, you have to have a more substantive reason than just "it's old" to get an updated computer. E.g., when Obama took over the White House, they found a lot of legacy hardware [wired.com], including 6 year old MS software, which I presume means they were running XP SP1.
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:1, Interesting)
Likewise, my company skipped over Vista without much of a second thought, but they're all aboard to switch to Win7.
Of course, it's also due to the fact they got audited by Microsoft and found to be using more copies of some software than our license allowed. Installing Access and Frontpage or something on everyone's computer when there was a limited allotment, even when people didn't ask for these programs. (Yes, our IT staff don't appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed at times.)
So, to avoid a harder slap on the wrist, our new MS contract requires us to upgrade to Win7. I guess that's how MS gets it's numbers padded.
Re:I wouldnt make plans to deploy it either (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. This article and summary should both be tagged troll. The only actual news here is that 34% of the companies surveyed already have plans to have it deployed by the end of next year and it's not even released yet!
Now I'm no huge fan of Microsoft, but I'd guess this is about their best pre-release effort ever. They have definitely done some things right this time around.
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:5, Interesting)
If you say so. I'm at a military manufacturing facility, and there are no plans to move away from XP ever. In fact we're more likely to move onto Linux than go to Windows Vista or Windows 7.
It's the economy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, the economic conditions are the #1 reason our company won't be deploying Windows 7 within the next year.
Our business is heavily tied to the housing market and new business construction (shopping centers, gas stations, dept. stores, etc.) We're still on Windows XP on our workstations and laptops (about 50 machines total). A migration to Windows 7 would basically involve buying all new hardware too, because other than maybe 3 or 4 of the desktops we bought most recently, the rest are SLOW with XP, much less Windows 7.
Right now, we have no interest in changing anything unless the economy improves (which is doubtful it will lead to a big increase in sales for us before the next year is out).
And honestly, like another person said who posted here - there's a very real possibility to moving to Macs if we had to do a wholesale purchase of new hardware.... A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable around here. But since then, several employees have purchased new iMacs for use at home, and all have very positive things to say about them. We have a few applications we use which are only available for the Windows platform, but honestly, we could serve these just fine over our Terminal Server. The Microsoft remote desktop client for OS X works pretty well. As the systems administrator, I'd like a Mac workstation environment here, because it would practically eliminate spyware/virus hassles and save thousands per year on anti-virus software subscriptions. From what I've seen with Windows 7 so far, it has a HUGE number of configurable options buried in it, for everything imaginable. It embodies the typical MS idea that "more is more!", and it's going to be a huge undertaking building a comprehensive group policy to enforce across a LAN/WAN to lock down all the settings the way you want them for your corporate deployment. OS X tends to present the OS to the user the way Apple intended it to be, and many things aren't even configurable without 3rd. party "hacks". That's not always something a home "power user" finds as a positive, but I think it's beneficial for a business setting.
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:3, Interesting)
In this economy, our company considers a lot of things but then when real $$$ appear, they are inevitably pushed off.
We have an enterprise license from Microsoft so it isn't the cost of the software (about the same if we have XP on all machines or win 7).
The main issue would be new machines (I just got a new one last year before everything went to crap in the economy) which they have extended from a 3 year to a 4 year window.
Then it would be confirming all our old custom software works correctly.
I'm certain we'll go to windows 7-- it just may be 3 years from now (so 2012? 2013?)
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummm....You're electing the same guy every time by picking XP over and over and over again. You know he has vulnerabilities with IE6 and other security issues, and now that 80% of new computers have 1GB of RAM or more, he's too barebones for you anymore. He's looking a bit dated. You can put bandages on him forever, but he's very prone to infection.
What this survey says is that 40% of companies surveyed have plans to deploy Windows 7 in the next 1.5 years (2009 is half over, iirc).
People: That's not a bad number. After a failboat like Vista and with the current economy, its actually quite good.
The reality of the situation is that companies will not be buying the OS and installing it on current computers....they will be buying new computers with Windows 7 already them most likely. They don't want to deal with upgrade procedures and any other nonsense. Look: It even says "We have skipped upgrades or delayed purchases - 34.8%"....I'd love to assume that alot of that number is for actual computers onsite and not just server/datacenter room equipment.
MS extended XP so that Win7 could be tested by organizations and they could just do a full jump from XP to 7 and skip Vista like it never happened.
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:4, Interesting)
A millitary (manufacturing) facility, running XP?
Does nobody think that this is pretty scary in itself?
Imagine the displays there showing the infamous Playmobil design, and in front of it a big colorful set of buttons that honk when you hit/push them.
And you suddenly have to think of the movie Idiocracy. ^^
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course most of you refuse to upgrade because the new thing either:
A: Doesn't have enough shininess.
B: Doesn't work like the old thing.
I think it is quite likely that XP will hang around for quite some time because it works fine and because companies do use a lot of old software. So, just like intranets are probably keeping IE6 alive, old software will keep XP alive.
I think MS has learned a lesson from XP. Never build an OS that's too good otherwise you can't selling a new version to people as and when you feel like it.
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has imposed limitations on Win 7 Starter Edition for netbooks. No more than 1GB of RAM, no screen sizes larger than 10.2-inches. At least the hard disk restriction has moved from a maximum of 160GB to a higher max of 250GB.
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/25218/1105/ [itwire.com]
On that sort of underpowered netbook, Windows XP is capable of running more than just the OS and say, Word, without thrashing the hard disk to death.
While Windows 7 does a much better job than Windows Vista of booting up AND running a single program like Word or Excel with only one Gig of RAM, Windows XP is undeniably more capable on the same limited Hardware.
Re:I'll deploy Win7 (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice to see you believe liberty includes the right to murder. You don't have the first clue what liberty is. Get a dictionary, then chastise. Not the other way around.