

60% of companies plan to skip Windows 7 - sdfx
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE56C0NC20090713?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews

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makecheck
One of the main reasons cited is no time and resources to upgrade. And that is
probably strongly related to the current recession.

It seems "only human" for people to cut back and save when the economy is bad,
but unfortunately that is also the wrong thing to do in order for the economy
to recover, and the wrong way to reboot a business. Now is _exactly_ the time
for companies to be investing in their futures, and I.T. is one of those major
spending areas. With smart spending today, they could be extremely well
positioned in a year or two.

A related problem is that I've yet to witness an I.T. group that operates
incrementally, or in a parallel testing fashion; it seems that everything has
to become a snowball in order to happen at all.

There _are_ ways to make upgrades perfectly safe, and achievable over a longer
period of time when resources are scarce. For example, machines could be
upgraded a few at a time in isolation (ideally with a production-like parallel
test environment), starting with the more experienced users. And, the culture
could evolve to commit to incremental improvements in business applications on
a _regular_ basis, so that change is _expected_ instead of being some rare
event that scares everyone and threatens to tear the company apart at the
seams.

~~~
hvs
That's what our company does, but there are still significant costs associated
with it. Even if you only want to upgrade a few machines at a time, you
probably still have to purchase licenses for everyone, especially if you want
to get bulk licensing deals. Working with Microsoft's pricing system is
complicated enough without trying to incrementally purchase from them. So,
it's often easier just to avoid the upgrade process altogether.

~~~
makecheck
But pressure can be applied to vendors.

For instance, you tell the vendor that your entire site upgrade is contingent
on having access to betas, previews, or some limited number of licenses for X
number of months so that you may port and test your internal applications.
This is hardly an uncommon problem when upgrading, and it's a good bet for a
software vendor to allow small samples for a short period in order to enable
larger purchases.

It also doesn't hurt to remind vendors of what you could be doing instead of
putting up with them. Tell Microsoft you'll virtualize all of Windows on Mac
OS X. Tell them you've been impressed lately by OpenOffice 3. It doesn't even
matter if you have a real intention to switch, they just have to believe that
you will.

~~~
hvs
I don't think you've ever dealt with Microsoft before. You can do some of the
usual negotiating, but there is no strong-arming them. They have pretty fixed
pricing models and are only willing to work with you to a point. Other
software vendors, sure, they'll do almost anything to make a sale, but
Microsoft is in a whole different universe of software distribution.

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roc
In this 'Current Economic Climate' I wouldn't say any upgrade survey reflects
on the product itself.

Frankly, I'm surprised 40% would even consider a project of that size.

~~~
encoderer
Not to mention... 40% of companies buying your product is a success no matter
how you slice it. I don't care what anybody says. That's a success.

~~~
jimbokun
Even if your market share was closer to %100 of companies previously?

Although I'm not sure what percentage of companies have skipped entire
generations of Windows, previously, to make an actually meaningful comparison.

~~~
jcl
Actually, it's great news for Microsoft, since the market share for Vista is
less than 20% (<http://e-janco.com/browser.htm>), and I'm guessing almost all
of those are home users who got it by default. 40% is great if your market
share was closer to 0% previously. :)

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raganwald
Allow me to try rephrasing this:

"60% of companies say XP is good enough for their purposes."

We could get into whether Windows 7 is compelling or not, but perhaps for what
most companies need done, XP does it.

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imbaczek
isn't this much higher than vista?

~~~
ori_b
It's also in the middle of a recession.

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growt
Well MS might just end the support on Vista someday and then companies would
have to upgrade to 7 or end up with an unsupported product. Or you buy some
new office machines and they'll have 7 preinstalled (so you have to spend
extra cash to "downgrade"). I think once you're locked in to Microsoft
products it's not entirely up to you if you can "skip".

~~~
pilif
trust me, end of support is no reason for some companies to update. I'm seeing
Windows NT4 boxes all over the place in my daily business and it hurts.

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abalashov
Another possibility is that XP worked Microsoft out of a "job" (upgrade cycle)
by coming, over its life cycle, to be extremely rock-solid.

Most upgrade cycles are initiated by a perceived _lack_ of future
compatibility in a fairly imminent time frame. If compatibility is expected
indefinitely, there just isn't an incentive.

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grinich
The companies cite "lack of time and resources" as the reason they won't
upgrade. What does this include? Training? IT support time? Actual put-the-
disc-in-the-machine-and-wait time?

~~~
Jem
Existing software & driver compatibility, hardware compatibility (and cost of
replacing old kit), roll-out time and user training are just the beginning.

Enterprise-scale rollouts for new software are never as simple as "putting the
disc in the machine and waiting".

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tsally
How many verions are you going to skip before you switch to something that is
actually engineered well?

~~~
nailer
I use OS X for desktops and Ubuntu for servers. For me, Windows 7 is
engineered well as a desktop OS:

* More granular user access control

* Win left and right for easy split screen, a feature Mac and Ubuntu could both do with.

* Proper DPI scaling, for nearly all apps, with full crispness. My eyes aren't great and this is really helpful.

* Updated Powershell UI with method browsing etc. built in.

~~~
tsally
Splitscrean in Ubuntu is actually quite easy with Nvidia's driver package. I
don't know what kind of granular access control Window's 7 has, but I can't
imagine it's more granular than the functionality Unix can provide through
groups. There are also several terminal emulators that easily match
Powershell.

The only thing Windows has going for it is proper DPI scaling for all apps.
Everything else is just Windows playing catchup with technologies that have
been deployed on Unix systems for years.

Also realize that half of the features you mention have to do with driver
support, and nothing with the actual engineering of the OS. Just becuase
Microsoft can use its clout to force vendors to write dirvers for its OS
doesn't say anything about the OS itself.

~~~
nailer
Unix apps use userhelper symlinks and pam service files (which may invoke
group memberships) as equivalent to Windows UAC. Userhelper (or gksudo
instead) is either off or on. There is no 'on for particularly sensitive
operations, off for others' levels per Windows 7.

Also no Unix has a shell with object pipelining. Ie, you can run 'ps | where
starttime < 2 hours' on Unix, you'd need to screenscrape using regexs (ie, sed
/ awk / etc). Powershell provides a separation between presentation and data
that's quite refreshing. There are nix equivalents of this concept, they
they're unstable and have very few commands available.

There is not a single driver on Unix, proprietary or OSS, that provides proper
perfectly crisp DPI scaling for all applications in X. Nor do I believe this
would be handled at the driver layer, but more the GTK (or QT etc) layer as it
is for MFC in Windows.

Neither granular access control, object pipelining, or application DPI scaling
are driver related.

~~~
nailer
Also, now I've worked out what you meant: win left and win right are window
management shortcuts to maximise vertically and size to 50% horizonally.
Nothing to do with multihead.

It's likely one of the less common window managers implements something
similar, but GNOME, XFCE and KDE do not (and to use those other window
managers, you'd lose support for freedesktop.org shortcut files and have to
recreate your menus).

