Joshua Levine of ChangeWave Alliance c onducted a survey of its more than 1600 corporate IT execs. (ChangeWave is a research company owned by Phillips Investment Resources.) Every quarter the organization conducts a survey on IT spending. The major finding was that almost two-thirds of respondents are not planning on spending their bucks on Vista. (Read more.)
"Similar to previous survey findings in April, there is still no great rush in the corporate world to adopt Vista. Most importantly, 62% of respondents said their company has no plans to upgrade to Vista -- one point less than previously."
Moreover, the study shows that somewhat more corporations that will be buying new PCs with XP instead of Vista.
Despite Microsoft's claims that 60 million copies of Vista have been sold, independent research doesn't show much enthusiasm by corporations or consumers for the new PC OS In August ChangeWave surveyed consumers and found that 61% did upgrade to Vista, but mostly because it came preinstalled on a new computer.
"But when we asked future PC buyers what they'd like to have preinstalled on the computer(s) they planned on buying, Windows XP (43%) still edged out Vista (42%). It's pretty clear from these results that few consumers are dying to have Vista on their computers. But why?
According to our survey, the biggest reason for the slow Vista adoption curve was the negative response from current Vista users. Among the 13% who currently use Vista at home, one-in-three said they were unsatisfied with the product -- up eight points since June."
What would Microsoft have to do to make Vista more appealing? Well, obviously scare tactics about its security issues -- such as the WGA meltdown would have to end. What else?
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Vista
I am an IT professional with regional responsibilities in a Fortune 500. I have Vista on a few of machines. Hate it. From a user perspective; everything has been moved around on the menus [again!] strange hard to distinguish pastel colors, thin, fading boxes, lots of tricks and traps. Basically business users want easy to see, readable fonts and boxes, snappy response, not slow fade to what-ever. With the higher definition screens in use the icons are small hard to see. The interface [even after setting everything possible to Classic] is just plain frustrating, if they want to “fix” things behind the curtain, fine, just leave us with an solid stable front end, users HATE having to figure out where everything has move to or the new “cool” name for the old function is now.
“if it ain’t broke”
Vista
Couldn't agree more! I'm also an IT Pro and I have it on my laptop and few other machines for testing. Got used to it after a while but it's still a very heavy OS! Minimum RAM needed for a "good" experience is 2GB. Some of the new features are good to have and some are even becoming necessities. Although we're covered licensing wise (Enterprise Agreement), and taking all the Pros and Cons into consideration, I don't think I will start introducing Vista to end users before 1 year.
In my company, we are buying
In my company, we are buying PCs with Vista, but downgrading to XP. The reason is to own the Vista license for when we are ready to deploy Vista.
We are voting with our feet
Our company is a small start-up with 6 people. We started out with a mixture of XP, Windows 2000, and Windows Small Business Server 2003 machines. But we are now abandoning Microsoft except for two desktops which will continue to run XP.
There were two events that drove us away from Microsoft. The first was a Demo CD. When one of us tried to run it on an XP machine, "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) popped open a window which said, "You do not own this software and are not allowed to run it." That was a "Fuse Blower" because it was a DEMO that we certainly should have been allowed to run. We expected a crippled and/or time limited version. The last thing we expected was a "You can't run this because you don't own it." message from Microsoft.
The second "Fuse Blower" for us was when one of our Small Business Server 2003 machines spontaneously shutdown. We restarted it, only to have it shut-down again about an hour later. Eventually, we called Microsoft for help. First they quoted us $475 for "per incident" support and asked for a credit card number to which they could bill this incident. When we refused and told them we were sure this was their problem, they relented and told us we are required to prove to them we have a valid license for the copy of SMB Server 2003 we were running. It seems Microsoft wants us to prove to them that we have a valid SMB 2003 Server license every six months, or our business application(s) running on that machine will stop after running for one hour, until we "renew" our license with Microsoft.
That did it. We decided Microsoft was causing more trouble for us than they are worth.
We are now converting all but two of our machines to Ubuntu Linux, including all of our servers and most of our desktops and laptops. We are keeping two XP machines so we can test our website with IE, and so we can use one piece of proprietary software for which there is no equivalent to run on top of Linux. Eventually, we may move entirely to Linux, and run one virtual Windows XP machine instead of two real XP machines for our Windows specific software.
Ubuntu Linux offers us all of the functionality we had with our previous collection of Windows machines, but with two distinct advantages. First, we will no longer be treated like pirates by Microsoft and have to deal with MS disabling our server(s) every six months. We never were pirates, but having a server shut down until we could prove (again) we have a valid license for that machine was a bit much. Second, we do not need to buy any new computers just to run the OS underneath the few basic applications we all use. Open Office, Firefox, and Evolution do pretty much everything we need. Now it looks like we will be replacing our computers when we see a performance need, instead of when someone dictates to us that we must buy new machines if we want to run their software.
So what will it for corporations to move to Vista?
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Does Microsoft need to make it more enterprise friendly ... and if they don't, would you consider some other desktop OS (not that the choices are great there for the enterprise, either).
Wondering what kind of options there are if a corporation doesn't want to/need to move to Vista when it refreshes its PCs. Then again, guess there's no reason why a company couldn't stay with XP for many more years.