Businesses don’t like upgrading software. Everyone knows that. Windows XP has been out for 5 years now, and a lot of businesses are only just, or have only recently, made the move to XP. There is even still a very large portion of businesses using Windows 2000 or even earlier systems.
But Microsoft Watch have voiced fresh concerns that businesses may not see the benefit of upgrading to Vista. Whereas home users will get Vista bundled with new machines, and slowly that way Vista will displace XP machines, business PCs don’t work like that.
Microsoft need to convince businesses there is a very good reason or a ‘killer feature’ that will save them money. Microsoft are pushing Vista’s ‘increased security’, but there doesn’t seem to be something that will really get businesses wanting to move. If Microsoft don’t do this, we will have a similar situation in a few years where businesses are only beginning to take up Vista.
Another issue is speed. In order to be worth an upgrade, Vista needs to run acceptably on current hardware. At the moment, entry-level specification hardware will struggle (or worse) to run Vista.
The Microsoft Watch article featured an extract from an instant messaging conversation with an anonymous enterprise user. The conversation is quite interesting.
MR. Biz: how are they going to make a business case for Vista?
MJF: that’s a good question…. I’m not really sure
MR. Biz: no matter how much tweaking MS does, it’s still not going to solve the resource requirements issue
…
MR. Biz: they can’t afford to put $2000+ desktops on each desk
MR. Biz: and buy all new copies of office to run on It
MR. Biz: what we’re talking about is a TCO of about $3000 per desktop
MR. Biz: maybe even more than that
MR. Biz: that’s before support costs
And he’s right. Even from the experiences of running Vista Beta 2 on my fairly mid-range hardware (P4 @ 3.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Geforce 6600 GT), it is a lot slower than Vista. I know Huw had trouble getting Vista B2 to run even at an acceptable level of speed on his entry level laptop.
If businesses can’t see a particular reason which makes Vista better, they’re very unlikely to upgrade. But if Vista won’t run acceptably on their current-gen hardware, they’re even less likely to upgrade.
The biggest mistake Microsoft made is having Vista be a resource hog followed by removing almost every feature they promised.As per security Vista still makes every user administrator by default making security null and void on Vista.
It will be exploited just like XP. Why don’t they just teach people how to use the restricted user account properly and 99% of the security issues are gone.OH WAIT then they can’t access and control your system that way. Silly me.