QuoteIt's been five years since the last release of Microsoft's Windows operating system, and more than three since the previous iteration of its Office word-processing and spreadsheet program debuted. So when businesses get the chance to buy the newest flavors?Windows Vista and Office 2007?on Nov. 30, you might think there would be a lot of pent-up demand. Not so much.
QuoteBut Microsoft (MSFT) faces another challenge. Many corporate buyers don't believe there's enough pizzazz in the new software to increase their budgets to deploy new products right away. The Society for Information Management, a trade group of business tech buyers, polled its members in October and found that 58% haven't decided when they'll roll out Vista. Another 27% plan to do so in 2008 and beyond.
Microsoft Vista: Companies Can Wait (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2006/tc20061129_739121.htm?campaign_id=bier_tcd.g3a.rss1130n)
Now of course we all know that any new rollout faces the same problems however this BusinessWeek article indicates that adoption of Vista will be even more conservative. Now, I know the large organization that I contract with has no current plans to upgrade anytime soon (in fact they switched over to XP just under a year ago), what do you guys think? Is Vista a "gotta have it" upgrade or is it just the MS upgrade treadmill turning over again?
I think it will be big in the US, as the new OS combined with Exhcange 2007 and Office 2007 contain a pile of new ways to control information within an organization. This is a big issue now in the US with the Sarbanes Oxley and other rules and regulations that have come about.
After 5 years on XP its probably time to upgrade the OS. A lot of nice stuff in it like Lazy says and from a consumer standpoint having all the previous features like media center included in the Ultimate edition is pretty tight. The DirectX hardware powered UI is a long time coming.
I'm on the fence because of 2 things personally.
1. Lack of SLI (this is nvidia's problem, but its a problem thats preventing my upgrade)
2. The new start menu (i really don't like it)
Having Media Center in the Ultimate Edition is good for the home user. However, the article linked talks about business users upgrading, not home users. One of the points of the article that I agree with is that although new technology may allow users to work more efficiently, it might just as well get in the way until the users have been trained on it. And it's this time at the outset that might keep business from upgrading for now - their workers are too busy to get interrupted and require training.
Quote
Pacific Life Insurance began testing Vista on 50 PCs in August and found it immediately lowered costs. It reduced individual installations from four hours of employee time to less than five minutes, freeing up workers for other tasks.
Umm, Vista only requires five minutes of employee time to install, but XP required four hours? I call bull@%&#.
Well 5 minutes seems pretty extreme the installation is now a disc image as opposed to a file structure being uncompressed and built. So however long it takes to drop the Vista image on to the drive and do hardware drivers.
The VISTA image system is also hardware independent. Using tools like Ghost with XP you need to update or create a new image for every hardware platform in your organization.
VISTAs installer also has some great scripting so one image can auto install an assortment of apps depending on the target.
Quote from: Lazybones on December 01, 2006, 05:04:57 PM
The VISTA image system is also hardware independent. Using tools like Ghost with XP you need to update or create a new image for every hardware platform in your organization.
This is a Marketing Gimic from M$. At NAIT we have 1 image for our clones, HP, Compaq and laptops computers. You just need to know how to build an XP/2003 image right. The only thing the Vista Script install has over a ghost image is that it will be better optimized for the hardware it runs on. Other than that, this is just a bunch of Marketing trying to sell the product.
Quote from: Melbosa on December 01, 2006, 06:36:18 PM
At NAIT we have 1 image for our clones, HP, Compaq and laptops computers. You just need to know how to build an XP/2003 image right.
Building up images like that is a pain in the ass.. Also how do you handle supporting single, hyper threaded and dual core systems with one HAL? Do you load the just the generic single core HAL in the image?
Quote from: Thorin on December 01, 2006, 04:16:10 PM
Having Media Center in the Ultimate Edition is good for the home user. However, the article linked talks about business users upgrading, not home users.
I was aware of that when posting, I felt that putting some positive reasons for the home user in my post might help those on the forum who are looking at Vista.
I recall these exact same "businesses won't upgrade" type news articles way back 5 years ago when XP was coming out, yet I would consider XP to be a successful operating system.
Quote from: Lazybones on December 03, 2006, 01:56:39 AM
Quote from: Melbosa on December 01, 2006, 06:36:18 PM
At NAIT we have 1 image for our clones, HP, Compaq and laptops computers. You just need to know how to build an XP/2003 image right.
Building up images like that is a pain in the ass.. Also how do you handle supporting single, hyper threaded and dual core systems with one HAL? Do you load the just the generic single core HAL in the image?
A single HAL is fine. We haven't seen much dual cores yet at NAIT as we are primarily an Intel shop. The only time we would need 2 or 3 images would be the Dual Cores, or if changing architecture (AMD vs Intel), although we found that most of the time the second was a huge issue either.
Hyperthreading really only gives you about a 5 - 10 % increase in speed. We really only do fresh installs on servers, not workstations.
I installed Vista today on my home workstation. From the minute i pressed the spacebar to boot from cd to the time im looking at a blank desktop was 23 minutes. Not to shabby.