What’s holding Vista back?

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.

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.

The timing, however, isn’t arbitrary. Bechtel began last January and spent four months putting a standard desktop configuration together before it began a pilot. In parallel, Bechtel was testing its 500 applications using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit. “Our applications compatibility has gone pretty well,” says Wettling, who adds that the testing process is slated to be done by year-end.

One bump in the road has been BitLocker, the disk-encryption technology in Vista, which lacks centralized management controls that Bechtel requires. The company is rolling out BitLocker, however, because the encryption technology it uses now is not ready for Vista. Another feature generating interest is Vista’s Meeting Space, which makes it possible to create ad hoc networks via peer-to-peer features made possible by Vista’s support of IPv6. “Stuff like that is useful to Bechtel; when we start a new job site, we don’t have a network to support it,” Wettling says. Bechtel forecasts it will be a three-year process to upgrade the company’s 18,000 desktops around the world.

For others, the decision on Vista was influenced by other projects.

The city of Indianapolis just completed a migration from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft’s Outlook. It is consolidating servers on its VMware platform, and it plans to deploy Office 2007 and SharePoint Server in 2008.

Vista will become part of that rollout, according to Shital Patel, CIO for the city, who plans on dovetailing it with the normal refresh cycle of PCs. She says the city is working through application-compatibility issues and will confront hardware problems, given its standard desktop configurations today.

But technical problems with Vista aren’t near the top of the issues list. “For the most part, these are similar to issues we have had in the past,” Patel says.

What is part of the Vista planning is logistics, given that the city has 2,000 mobile laptops it needs to get back into the office to complete upgrades. The city also must coordinate with 54 departments and 74,000 users. “I think the biggest issue is change management, moving away from familiarity users have with software,” Patel says. She says that was the major issue with the Outlook move.

Wettling and Patel are but two examples of users taking a calculated approach to Vista: Several studies are bearing out they are not alone. In the Forrester report, 42% of Vista deployments for the 565 IT managers interviewed will start between 2008 and 2010, with 17% of those taking place in 2009 and 2010.

Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray, who conducted the survey, says the most telling numbers were when data was compared year over year. An earlier version of the survey published in May 2006 found large companies had aggressive Vista plans, with 34% planning on starting deployments in 2007.

“When we refreshed the study in the third quarter of 2007, that number had dropped precipitously down to 7% for deployment starts in 2007. Vista was still on their road map, but the questions are ‘when’ and ‘how,’” Gray says. Besides application compatibility and hardware issues, a third factor in the technology equation is Service Pack 1, he says. “Experience was telling companies they should not even be considering deploying a new operating system before SP1,” he says.

It’s a reputation Microsoft has been trying to live down for years. With Vista, the company has released piecemeal updates to improve security and performance and reduce start-up times. Microsoft also has released two reliability and compatibility packs. The company is recommending that only those who need the upgrades install them, and that others wait until Service Pack 1. All the advance updates will make it into the service pack, which is now in beta with private testers.

Microsoft last month even let users downgrade the new Business and Ultimate versions of Vista to XP Pro on new machines purchased from Dell, HP and Lenovo.

“All of the Vista issues taken together are forcing users to pull back, but not cancel deployments by any means,” Gray says. “Vista is still one of the hottest topics we hear about at Forrester.” With roughly 2% of the Windows installation base on Vista, however, the Vista era is starting with a whimper, he says. He thinks it is only a matter of time, however, before Vista roars into IT shops that should be getting prepared now.