System builders eXPerience gain, as large vendors feel Vista pain
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Resistance to Vista was expected among the large companies that have leverage with large PC vendors, but even in the consumer and SMB ranks, the clamor for XP is significant. The beneficiaries? Possibly, "white-box" system builders and direct-sales channels.
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Company finally gets Vista out the door. It also spends a bundle on acquisitions and looks ahead to the "computing cloud."
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By LEE GOMES The Wall Street Journal  The launch of Microsoft's new Vista operating system Tuesday was supposed to put Windows in the limelight.
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As expected, the PC industry is ready with new Vista computers after years of delays. But the immediate impact on the PC market could be muted.
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Computerworld readers across the country have written in angered and frustrated by anitpiracy features that are included in the new Vista operating system.
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InfoWorld - Windows Vista&#160;isn&#39;t the only recently released Microsoft software that will give users headaches when they upgrade their systems. Corporate users, partners, and analysts said upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 from previous versions also may be a lengthy and painful process for companies, which may want to take a wait-and-see approach to the new software.
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Nearly half of businesses are in some phase of preparing to update desktops to Windows Vista with small businesses moving the fastest to implement the OS, according to a new report released Monday.The number of organizations evaluating and testing Vista increased from 29 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent by early November 2007, found the report, commissioned by reseller CDW and based on information collected by Walker Information from 772 IT decision makers. Moreover, about 35 percent of companies are currently implementing or have implemented Vista already, compared to 12 percent last February, the report said.The report is the third of a wave of reports on Vista adoption that CDW has done since the OS was in its final testing phases in October 2006. In the latest phase of release, which tracked Vista adoption from October 31 until Nov. 7, 2007, small businesses comprised 53 percent of those companies either using or evaluating Vista. The higher-education segment came in second, with 49 percent reporting that they are evaluating or using the OS, while medium-to-large businesses were third, with 48 percent.Because of lingering hardware and application compatibility issues between existing company IT assets and Vista, CDW still advises customers to move to Vista on a case-by-case basis, said David Cottingham, director of product and partner management at CDW. In the case of small businesses, they may not have the application or hardware dependencies on Windows XP that larger businesses have.&quot;There are still definitely concerns when you get into custom applications in industries that will run on XP,&quot; he said. &quot;If [companies] have custom applications that don&#39;t run on Vista yet, they&#39;re going to stay on XP.&quot;CDW is still selling both XP and Vista, but Cottingham said the company does not have data on which version of the OS is selling more now that Vista has been available to businesses for more than a year. In September, Microsoft had to extend the OEM&#160;license for XP for five more months through June 30, 2008, because of customer demand for the OS. Microsoft had planned to stop selling XP through OEMs and retailers on Jan. 31.For its part, Microsoft has made strides to resolve compatibility issues with updates to Vista, and the numbers from CDW&#39;s survey seem to reflect that. In February, 50 percent of companies said they were buying additional hardware and software assets to migrate to Vista; by November, that number was down to 44 percent.Many believe it&#39;s inevitable that any businesses currently running XP will eventually move to Vista; it&#39;s just a matter of when. The release of Vista SP! (Service Pack 1), which is scheduled to be generally available by the end of March, should serve to increase the numbers of companies adopting Vista. Microsoft issued on Friday a public refresh of the first release candidate for SP1, which suggests the software update will be in its final release according to schedule.However, there is some belief among industry watchers that if Microsoft releases the next version of Windows, code-named Windows Vista 7, by its target of late next year to early 2010, some businesses may opt to skip Vista and move directly from XP to Windows 7 instead.
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Nothing elicits fear and loathing across the land like the announcement of a major Windows upgrade. Grown men and women quake at the thought of hours of troubleshooting. Corporate IT departments don full battle gear and issue stern warnings against upgrading before they've tested for incompatibilities. Small children weep when their favorite computer games suddenly won't run.
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Vendor uncertainty and instability is highly correlated to perceived risk, and there are some big storage vendors out there with some large question marks hanging around their necks, including Sun, Symantec and HP.
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Large vendors such as Microsoft and Citrix are expanding into the field of Microsoft virtualization that VMware has long dominated.
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In a move to ease business migration to its latest operating system, Microsoft released six new Vista deployment tools on Tuesday. But at least one analyst believes the tools might actually lead to businesses delaying deployment.
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David Daoud ran into trouble when he  started using Vista, the new version of Windows that Microsoft  Corp. and PC makers have spent millions of dollars advertising  since it came out six months ago.
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Server virtualization may be enterprise computing's latest technology, but a recent survey of corporate IT buyers shows that near-term adoption may not match the hype.
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Companies are taking several paths to overcome user- and vendor-created hurdles to the implementation of virtualization technologies.
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Among the factors sited: the ability to customize the software and avoid vendor lock-in.
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InfoWorld?s petition asking Microsoft not to discontinue Windows XP after June 30 has garnered more than 65,000 signatures since Jan. 14. And with those signatures have come thousands of reader comments that reveal why many IT organizations are up in arms about the June 30 deadline to retire XP.                                                    Three reasons dominate the resistance to Vista: performance, compatibility, and cost. All of them can be overcome with investments in hardware, software, training, and support. The question is whether the upgrade will help businesses increase sales, perform better, or serve customers more effectively -- especially when other IT initiatives with more ROI potential, from greening the datacenter to more effective partner integration, may fall back in the queue as a result. A recent Gartner study confirms that such direct business benefit is now driving IT budgets, not new technology for its own sake.[ SignInfoWorld?s Save XP petition to ask Microsoft to keep XP available after June 30. ]Lots of pain, little gainJohn Alber, CTO at Bryan Cave, a large, tech-savvy law firm in Los Angeles, was willing to go on the record when he expressed misgivings about moving to Vista over the same trio of issues. Many other IT professionals were not, due to fears about damaging their company?s relationship with Microsoft. Off the record, one technology vendor told InfoWorld that it has indefinitely postponed its conversion to Windows Vista after several months of testing because the demonstrable benefit was elusive. Similarly, the IT staff at a large California school district has no plans to convert to Vista; its technology director said that Vista takes twice the hardware resources.In some cases, the changes that Vista brings reduce productivity or increase costs just to maintain existing capabilities. That?s why John Hawkins, CEO of Adviser Media, ended up removing Vista from a new laptop and then from his company, which maintains several how-to sites aimed at baby boomers. ?Whatever I tried to do, the new computer fought me -- and usually, it won. By ?do,? I mean basic stuff: save a file, connect to my office network and the Internet, turn on, turn off, copy some files. It's my computer -- shouldn't I be allowed to do these things? Nope, not without lots of effort, wasted time, and sometimes, complete failure,? he wrote in his blog.Basic incompatibilities also drive him to go back to XP, Hawkins told InfoWorld: ?My ?favorite? is that Vista doesn't work with many Wi-Fi access points (the main reason our users demanded a return to XP) -- and Microsoft's fix is to tell users to replace them!? Scott Pam shared this frustration: ?There are lots of incompatibilities on drivers,? noted the independent IT consultant in Palm Desert, Calif.Even some of those who like Vista on their home computers have been unable to use it for work. ?I love Vista on my home machine. But it would be completely impossible to use at work. I still need to support applications running on Pocket PC 2002 and Windows CE 4.2 platforms, and for that I need the development environment I wrote them with -- Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++. This is not supported, and doesn't work, on Windows Vista. Even where the customer has upgraded some devices, a move to Visual Studio 2005 native device development entails a change of libraries, which can have complicated breaking changes. Oh, and they broke serial ActiveSync as well,? noted a U.K. developer who declined to be identified.And of course, those much-publicized performance issues loom large. ?It uses mega hard disk space and has a lot more running programs in the background than XP,? noted a support technician at a broadband provider, who asked for anonymity.User frustration equals IT frustration Support staff and IT consultants also feel the pain, mainly from the confusion that Microsoft?s new UI and security controls cause their users.IT consultant Scott Pam is frustrated with the burden that Vista has placed on him. ?Customers are panicking,? he says, since they can?t find their data or common controls in the new UI and assume the data has been lost or their Vista PC is broken. ?So I go back for free [to explain how to use Vista], costing hundreds of dollars of my time.? He asks why Microsoft could not have offered its new security approach and other features without breaking the familiar Windows XP UI. ?Apple added new capabilities in all the versions since Mac OS X 10.2 but kept the interface, drivers, and applications mostly compatible. Microsoft changed everything.?The broadband company?s support technician faces the same user frustration. ?A lot of us cringe when we get a call regarding Vista. It is hard to understand, hard to find what we need, and hard to explain it to customers,? she said.The new UAC (user access control) security approach bedevils both IT consultant Pam and his clients. Not only do users not know how to respond to endless ?are you sure? messages about possible security threats, Vista?s lockdown of users? own files areas keeps clients from being able to work. He cites a user who dutifully copied all his data to a USB drive before converting to Vista, only to discover that Vista would not let him copy the data back because the USB drive wasn?t accessed through administrator privileges. ?That?s ridiculous -- it?s his drive,? Pam said. The idea of having to log in as an administrator just doesn?t occur to users, he noted.Jason Sage, a developer and software engineer who didn?t want his company named, is also frustrated by overzealous security in Vista, which he believes works against the standard set by Microsoft .Net and Visual Studio. True, in Vista, Microsoft has documented what developers need to do to give applications permission to access their own configuration files. But Sage thinks the basic approach is wrong. ?What we have now is applications running as the user. This is too much responsibility for many users who have no idea what all the software on their machine is doing while running as them.?Other developers are frustrated by the change in security and other core OS services. Noted one developer working at a small company: ?My company has had several developers forced to use Vista while servicing our clients. The result has been an absolute nightmare. Applications don't work, drivers collide, the screen loses integrity at random times, we encounter file data loss or corruption, our network-based automated backups don't work, etc.?Roadblocks on rollback to XP  Given the many frustrations he?s encountered, Pam advises his clients not to install Vista or to replace Vista with XP on new computers. And he seethes that he?ll have to get each of the five different Vista versions, and either five PCs to run them on or a Mac or Unix box with enough virtual machine capability to run them all, just so he can duplicate customers? environments.?Several of my customers have gone back to the store where they purchased their new computer and have asked that they replace Vista with XP,? he says.But users may not always have that choice, several InfoWorld readers noted. ?There are not always XP drivers available for a clean install of XP,? commented one reader, whose newer Toshiba?s NVidia video card had only Vista drivers. Another reader had a similar issue with a new Acer laptop: ?The hardware and firmware in my laptop's chipsets simply do not support XP.?Agents of change Not everyone is holding back on the shift to Vista, of course. Several InfoWorld readers expressed satisfaction. For example, an independent developer in the U.K., who did not want to be seen as a ?fan boy? and thus declined to be identified, told InfoWorld he prefers Vista to XP and views the UI changes and incompatibilities as minor issues. ?Vista is what Microsoft wanted XP to look like; when they couldn?t achieve Vista?s look they settled for the horrible design it has. Yes, Vista uses more resources than XP, but it runs absolutely everything 20 percent faster for me than XP ever did. Yes, drivers are a problem at the moment for older hardware that is capable of running Vista, but then the same was true for XP,? he said. ?Program compatibility has caused one or two problems recently, but nowhere near as many with XP when I first got it.?Other readers suggested that those who wanted to stick with XP were doing so because they simply didn?t want to invest in new hardware. All OS conversions cost time and money and change is just part of the technology landscape.For IT, the cost of such change -- directly and indirectly -- is the key issue in deciding when, or even if, to shift from XP. Microsoft has told the Wall Street Journal that resistance to adoption is ?business as usual? in a new OS?s first year, but eventually there?ll be no need for a petition effort like InfoWorld?s to keep an older OS available.The question is what ?eventually? means and what Windows 7, now rumored to be arriving next year, may offer instead. Meanwhile, if massive response from InfoWorld readers is any indication, few businesses are putting an upgrade from XP to Vista at the top of their to-do lists.
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(InfoWorld) - While it's taken Microsoft Corp. half a decade to bring out a new version of its client operating system, the real development work on Windows Vista only took around two years, according to the head of the company. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, reflected on what Microsoft had learned from the process and delays inÂ bringing Vista to marketÂ during a question-and-answer session followingÂ the business launch of the OSÂ Thursday in New York. "Time is sort of a funny thing," Ballmer said. "You need to give new technologies time to incubate before you try to bring them together," he added. "Let each [technology] come to market individually and then do the integration." Microsoft spent the first two years of its Vista development process building a variety of new technologies and then struggled to integrate them, according to Ballmer. The third year went smoothly as Microsoft's developers focused their efforts on the Windows XP Service Pack 2, with some of that technology ultimately winding up in Vista, not XP. The bulk of what has now been released as Vista Microsoft developed in the last two to two and half years, Ballmer said. With his habitual flair for superlatives, Ballmer described Vista as."the highest quality, most secure Windows operating system ever." However, he was quick to add that Microsoft won't rest on its laurels. In its next Windows client OS release, the vendor will look to do more to support the major changes already under way in computer hardware, notably the shift from single-core to multicore processors and improvements in network infrastructure, he said. Microsoft also wants to offer more functionality in its OS for IT administrators so that the software is simpler to manage and for software developers in relation to storage management and other features that didn't make it into Vista, according to Ballmer. A future operating system also needs to take into account the move from software to software-as-a-service or as Ballmer said, "software plus service." Users can expect to see "a lot more service enablement" in the Windows OS, he said. Ballmer estimated that by the time Microsoft launches the consumer versions of Vista and Office 2007 scheduled for Jan. 30, 2007 worldwide, the company will have spent "hundreds of millions of dollars" on marketing the new software. Â