What's holding Vista back?

Microsoft’s repeated release delays and feature cuts have knocked the operating system out of sync with corporate buying cycles and planning decisions

Adoption of Microsoft’s Vista isn’t slipping because of technical gotchas, but rather because of the repeated delays that have knocked it out of sync with corporate upgrade cycles. That has led many companies to sit tight on standardized Windows XP desktops, according to users.

Questions have been swirling about what’s wrong with Vista, which shipped nearly a year ago and has seen lukewarm reception at best from the IT community. The fact is that many companies finally have stabilized users and applications on XP and have little interest in launching into the testing and management of an operating system whose compelling features are logged as only a handful of security and performance boosts.

What began as a revolutionary reworking of the Windows operating system was comparatively a whimper when it arrived three years later than first promised and with features cut, such as the WinFS file system, that robbed it of its bravado.

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Adoption of Microsoft’s Vista isn’t slipping because of technical gotchas, but rather because of the repeated delays that have knocked it out of sync with corporate upgrade cycles. That has led many companies to sit tight on standardized Windows XP desktops, according to users.

Questions have been swirling about what’s wrong with Vista, which shipped nearly a year ago and has seen lukewarm reception at best from the IT community. The fact is that many companies finally have stabilized users and applications on XP and have little interest in launching into the testing and management of an operating system whose compelling features are logged as only a handful of security and performance boosts.

What began as a revolutionary reworking of the Windows operating system was comparatively a whimper when it arrived three years later than first promised and with features cut, such as the WinFS file system, that robbed it of its bravado.

Vista’s reviews do include some technical concerns, but complaints concerning device-driver availability, application compatibility and user-account control features have not been outside the scope of the technical issues raised about previous Microsoft operating-system releases, experts say.

Click to see: Plans for Vista

Perhaps the one true failure of Vista is that Microsoft again was unsuccessful in stamping out the perception that a new Windows operating system isn’t worthy until the first service pack. Vista Service Pack 1 won’t ship until early 2008.

A forthcoming study by Forrester Research shows that 52% of respondents have no plans to roll out Vista or don’t know when they might do it. The study shows 11% don’t plan to start a rollout until 2009, and another 6% are waiting until 2010.

The study also shows that 88% of companies with 5,000 to 20,000 users have standardized on XP. In fact, demand for XP is still so strong that users last month forced Microsoft to extend XP’s availability another five months.

Repeated delays in the delivery of Vista -- which came five years after Windows XP first shipped in late 2001 -- moved the operating system’s release to a point where many users had already begun or completed hardware-refresh cycles.

“When we look at all the activity in the bumper-crop year of PC purchases in 2005 and 2006, we see that a lot of companies have gone through upgrade cycles, so the likelihood of them turning around and saying, 'I am going to deploy new PCs with a new operating system for everybody in the company' would be relatively low,” says Ian Lao, senior analyst in the enabling technologies group at market analysis firm In-Stat.

Lao says such issues as testing and training make companies conservative and intent on staying with XP. “The average man on the street is happy with XP,” he says.

Users are stepping up to Vista, but only after carefully reviewing user and network needs and the needs of their applications. “The approach that Bechtel is taking is pragmatic,” says Fred Wettling, manager of IT standards and strategies for the San Francisco-based engineering and construction company. “We have gone through forklift upgrades before with Windows 95 and 2000, and it was a royal pain. Our approach on Windows 2000 and XP is the same one we will use with Vista, and that is to make it part of the normal evolution.” That will happen early in 2008, when Bechtel begins buying Vista PCs.