A View Towards Vista

It seems like only yesterday, but in reality it has been five years since the original release of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system.  This is an eternity in the technology industry if one believes in Moore's Law.

But now, sometime this week, in what is an invitation-only affair in New York, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil its next generation flagship operating system - Windows Vista - along with parts of the Office Productivity Suite of products (namely Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007).  In the past five year since the debut of XP, Microsoft has invested nearly $9 billion in XP's successor, Windows Vista, and the Office 2007 suite of applications.  And last year, desktop and server products made up a staggering 82% of Microsoft's revenue!

Will the wait be worth it?  Will Microsoft create its new cash cow with equal success - despite the pomp and circumstance?  Information Week has an interesting series of articles about Vista.

There have been more polls on the subject of Vista adoption and Office and Exchange upgrades than the sum of all milk money of all schoolchildren in the country (OK, that metaphor has been stretched to its limit, I'll abandon it now). And they've come up with a bewildering number of answers. Yes. No. Maybe.

The latest survey found that 86% of IT managers expect to implement Vista sooner or later but only 26% have an actual Vista implementation plan in place, according to CDW. In fact, this probably-but-later response has been the only thing that IT folks seem to agree on. Pretty much all of them˜with the exception of an extreme minority say they'll wait until there have been some real-world implementations by their more intrepid colleagues before attempting their own implementations.

I recently got a new computer for home to replace an aged (six year old!) computer in which I have upgraded the controller card, CPU, operating system and fan - all at least once.... but this beast is upgradeable to Vista.  Will I make the leap?  Probably.  Eventually.  But I am not a "REV 1" kind of person.  I will most likely wait a while - like the 86% cited above.

How about you?  What's your view about Vista?

 

Published Tuesday, November 28, 2006 9:29 AM by msteinberg
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Comments

# re: A View Towards Vista @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 2:35 PM

Upgrading to new windows versions is risky, complex and costly in a corporate environment. Its no wonder no one is racing to get vista installed.   A few years ago, I worked for a gaming company who developed their own core business applications that ran on NT and the developers were not game (excuse the oun) to try an upgrade to windows 2000.  It was just too risky.  

And then of course there is the microsoft licencing cost to deal with. Organisations use of office based software can be 1 or 2 years behind actual product releases because of this.

On a personal note, I use recording software with specialist PCI based audio I/O devices and getting updated drivers for these devices is not easy. In my case, the device is now superceded therefore I am not keen to move off XP as it may mean having to buy a new device, they are expensive.

I am sure that garden variety PCs and laptops will come equipped with vista with no other choice slowly driving the uptake.  Then the sys admin guys really go nuts trying to make this all work!!

Bruce Callaway

# re: A View Towards Vista @ Friday, December 01, 2006 8:51 AM

It's official.  And lots of information on the Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com/business/launch2007/default.mspx

On a separate note - Bruce makes a good point about one reason there might be delays;  the requirement to upgrade devices which work flawlessly with XP, but which might with Vista.

We will try to check in at the end of the first quarter, and see what has happened in 120 days.

msteinberg