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General IT ManagementDiscussion of challenges facing IT management including articles published throughout the Earthweb IT Management network at Datamation, eSecurityPlanet and CIO Update.
On June 30, Microsoft will stop selling XP, except in select, limited markets.
From Mike Elgan's article:
Killing XP "is a bet Microsoft will lose. The trickle of defections away from Windows will become a flood, and by the time the company ships Windows 7 they will have needlessly lost millions of loyal customers forever."
I disagree with the author. Microsoft makes it's OS money from the corporate world where users do not have a choice of the software they use. Currently there are no *nix software packages that come close to having functional compatibility with MS Office products especially for collaboration. Try to find the functionality of MS Outlook with MS Exchange in the *nix world. It does not exist. The only *nix programs out there go after the low hanging fruit such as older releases of MS Office and perhaps the current versions of MS Excel and MS Word. If companies switch to a different operating environment, what will they do with all of the archived documents come audit time? They won't get away with "Sorry Mr. IRS Auditor, we can't access any historical records from 4 years ago." A migration away from Microsoft products is a monumental task that can't happen in a short period of time. I've been involved in a few projects going the other direction, Solaris to Windows, MVS to Windows and MCP to Windows. The obstacles are the same as going from Windows to < enter operating system name here >. The bottom line is that the software used is inconsequential compared to the process of migration. The migration process itself is the mountain that must be moved.
I am currently migrating my own home domain from a Windows 2003 Server domain running IIS (web, ftp), Exchange Server, Office Server, SQL Server, DNS, ... to a *nix environment. That is a huge project not counting converting thousands of MS Office files to older formats so they are compatible with *nix office products, if at all. In the end I may not convert the clients to *nix because of the loss of functionality. Instead I'll end up moving applications from the servers to the clients.
The fatal error was allowing the sales team to design the OS. They put so much in that the developers were swamped. The process fizzled and had to be restarted. XP is mature and it works for many. Those not wanting to run on an 8 year old OS are switching to Mac OS and GNU/Linux rather than Vista. I just converted a new Vista machine to GNU/Linux. It went from 2 minutes booting to 22 seconds. This was an AMD64 X2 processor with 1 gB RAM.
I no longer have any need for XP except to print on a couple of special printers. Everything else can be done quite well with Debian GNU/Linux. That is our plan and it will be carried out within a year: conversion of most systems and GNU/Linux on all new systems. At the same time we will be using fanless thin clients to really cut costs and to increase the longevity of our system. We can set up and maintain twice as many seats with GNU/Linux as we can with XP or Vista.
I have been using GNU/Linux for a long time. The Vista debacle and killing XP make it very easy to convince my clients to switch.
I really agree, I bought my laptop with XP Pro long after Vista was out of beta, and of course I had to order it special to get XP. Vista is such a bloated convoluted mess of an OS, that even I, a lifelong windows user, will be headed to an alternative OS once I can no longer get XP.
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Datamation Online Community Manager
I find the main issue with Vista is the stupid UAC (User Access Control). You can disable it of course. I was wondering, has anyone applied Vista SP1? If so, I hope UAC is disabled by default.
Chris
GHR Software, ZIIA EIS, free Enterprise Information System www.ghrsoftware.com
I've applied SP1, but I already disabled UAC.
Change it if you don't like it. IMO parents like it for their kids.
It is just like any other setting so it should not be something to complain about.
Vista is not a compelling upgrade. (1) Peformance issues, ones that even a more powerful PC does not quell (continuous desktop searching without pause, continues paging even when no activity, 2 big examples). (2) No drivers for 'legacy' devices - in general, anything purchase as little as 1 year before Vista released does not have a driver for it. (3) Confusing - Microsoft was making baseline design decisions less than one year before release - big example: they wanted to use "saved searches" instead of physical folders for things used to be called "My Pictures", "My Documents" etc. - and in the final release sometimes you are referring to saved searches instead of real folders. They changed standard folder names to remove the spaces so you didn't have to "quote" them in scripts - when they could have instead made them equivalent so both would work. (4) No compelling must have features.
Why would they kill XP? Because they are in "monopoly" mode. They think whatever they decide will be forced on all of us. What they don't realize is that the alternatives to Windows will benefit - Apple Macs being the most obvious beneficiary with its ease of use benefits.
Oh, and about that corporate part - I am in a corporate world, and unlike what was expressed prior - we are not ready to jump from XP to Vista just because Microsoft says.
Finally, IE8 beta has few features over IE7, and the main thrust is to repair some of the problems caused by IE7 (I supervised the testing of >40 browser based APPs wtih IE7). So expect Microsoft to do the same thing with the successor to Vista - ie. Windows 7. [P.S. Did you know that: Vista's first two letters, "VI" are the roman numeral equivalents of 6 - and Vista is Windows 6?]
The sad truth is they're probably right. Even though somebody like myself might be inclined to try an alternative OS, most users won't, particularly novices who don't even realize there are alternatives out there.
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Datamation Online Community Manager
If a corporate user already has XP, I agree there is no compelling reason to move to Vista. However, the decision to move to something else has some huge financial penalties associated with the decision. A few of them involve lack of compatibility with existing/archived files, user training, collaboration and loss of functionality.
Given the corporate inertia, I don't see any migration from XP to another OS soon, Microsoft or otherwise.
In my company over 400 applications (not counting the Commercial Off the Shelf ones) need to be tested extensively with Vista to make sure there is no incompatibilities. If our experience with IE7 and Office 2007 is any indication, we will uncover problems that defy quick and easy solution in totally unexpected areas. E.g. Testing IE7 resulted in an Access application problem. Why? Because Access determines Internet/Intranet from the Internet Settings that change with IE7. Sure wasn't an expected problem - so what will Vista bring? I shudder to think of it.
Does anyone know of any business user with more than 100 desktops that has switched to Vista?
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