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Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
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When Microsoft Corp. released Windows Vista to businesses exactly one year ago, near-term expectations weren't high.
Experts widely predicted that Vista, even if it was bug-free and proved to be an immediate hit with consumers, would only slowly catch on with corporations. For instance, Gartner Inc. forecast at the time that fewer than 5% of PCs worldwide would be running a business version of Vista by the end of this year.
One year later, it's unclear whether Microsoft has met even those pessimistic projections. In July, Microsoft said companies had renewed 42 million Windows licenses that made them eligible for Vista. Trouble is, Microsoft also admitted that the vast majority of those 42 million PCs were likely still on XP, though the company claims it has no accurate way of tracking this. Microsoft has not provided a more up-to-date figure in the last four months.
According to another estimate of Vista's uptake, a Forrester Research Inc. survey of 565 North American and European PC decision-makers, after six to eight months, only 2% of corporate PCs were running Vista. By the end of this year, only 7% of respondents plan to even start deploying Vista at all, said Forrester analyst Ben Gray in that report.
Microsoft shipped a release candidate for Vista SP1 earlier this month. It still plans to release the final version in the first quarter next year. And Microsoft isn't standing still. The company is actively pushing a slew of free tools designed to help companies more easily plan for and deploy Vista.
Collegiate Housing Services used the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment tool and the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 to help it upgrade to Vista, Evans said. The tools helped his IT team upgrade nearly three times the number PCs in half the man-hours, he said.
Microsoft said Windows Vista Hardware Assessment has been downloaded 329,000 times, Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 340,000 times and the Business Desktop Deployment 2007 kit 283,000 times.
All this to say that things should start to pick up in the coming year. By the end of 2008, one quarter of corporate PCs in North America and Europe will be running Vista, according to Forrester's Gray. Linux will make continue to make minor inroads, but Gray is unequivocal that corporations will eventually standardize upon Vista the same way they have on XP.
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Not at all surprising. Been this way since time began...systems using DOS when Windows 98/2000 hit the shelves.. company I used to work for was still using 95 just as XP hit the market.
Easy for us end users to switch. What do we have in compared to a business? One... maybe a few systems to do some testing on, upgrade to the newer OS after a bit of time if things work. Especially considering biz type apps that have been tested, retested and written exclusively for a given OS or OS app like IE based online apps, then suddenly everything changes. In order to keep major costs down to a minimum, you can't expect businesses to just jump from one band wagon to the next even if they had five years of foreknowledge or a year to test before the final release.
Vista's finally starting to rub off on me as a usable OS. However, after extensive testing and thousands of read comments and help topics, we'll be giving the OS it's final chance at survival when we can afford to build a better machine.
In an industry like ours with many small business apps that are small market, industry specific written mostly by people who used to do the job but got into software development, things are slow to change. hell, one of our core business apps is only just moving from access 97 runtimes as it's core platform to 2003! and our document management system still isn't offering vista/office 2007 support (but it's due anytime - i'm looking at you opentext! get it shipped, not delayed for the n'th time!)
that said, i am running vista as my desktop at work (i rdp into out terminal server for the few apps i cant use yet), and on my home pc and work laptop. we're getting there!