6 out of 10 companies not moving to Win 7

[PeterCH]

The reality is that in any industry that grows as fast as business computing has, there will come a point of Good Enough. That's where we are right now. The vast majority of ISV applications in use support XP and still don't officially support Vista. Nine-year-old XP is still the sweet spot.

I recently spoke with an IT manager who was budgeting for an Office 2010 upgrade from Office 2003. I casually asked him what features he had deemed important enough to justify a $100,000 budget item. He thought for a minute and admitted that he couldn't think of a single one. So I asked the logical follow-up: Why are you buying it? He had no answer for that either. The $100,000 line item disappeared. He's also sticking with XP.

Rest here:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-microsofts-red-headed-stepchild-075?page=0,1&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-07-13

and here:
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/310984/survey_says_most_companies_won_t_deploy_windows_7

[lerouxjj]

Rest here:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-microsofts-red-headed-stepchild-075?page=0,1&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-07-13

and here:
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/310984/survey_says_most_companies_won_t_deploy_windows_7

I don't have a problem with your statement above. However the support for Windows XP will stop at some time in the future. At that point not having support would justify investment, maybe not right now. Many of our specialised applications battle to run on Vista. The hope is that those issues will be sorted in Windows 7. At least test Windows 7 and ascertain overall application compatibility.

Other than that no real reason to go to Windows 7. Most if not all new technologies works fine on Windows XP. In addition the cost crunch makes it very difficult to justify the investment to a board of directors.

Office 2007 (including Outlook) however is a lot more compatible with of course other Microsoft collaboration applications like Sharepoint and Office Communication Server. This opens up real time collaboration which makes information sharing easier. Having said that ot depends whether the company runs Microsoft products or not.

[killadoob]

The thing is companies will do well to move over too windows 7, pc's are far more stable under windows 7 and now there is no performance issues like vista.

My sister runs an accounting firm and when i was the IT guy i was there daily with windows xp related kuk.

You would be surprised how frustrating windows xp can be at times, i think windows 7 is the way forward for companies, vista was not due too it needing decent hardware to run well.

However with the economic crysis, most companies may not make the change and this is where microsoft fail badly. They need to slash the price of windows 7 and get back into the business market because too many businesses are struggling and do not have 2k per machine for windows.

Also the one thing you will notice when you are in IT and fixing pc's is your clients moan how slow their pc's are when using xp, reload and bam running fine again, 2 months later the same complaint. Windows 7 does not suffer that slow down that plagues windows xp.

[Bikerza]

I agree with the slow-down over time thing.
So, how does it work then that windows7 does not suffer from that?

[killadoob]

I agree with the slow-down over time thing.
So, how does it work then that windows7 does not suffer from that?

Well vista never suffered it from either, i am not sure what or why it slows down, all i know is xp is nice and fast for 4 weeks or so and then just declines in performance over the next few months.

I am not sure what they did but i know vista after a year and half was running just as fast as the day i installed it and windows 7 7048 after 3 months was running just as fast.

This for me is a major plus as i used too reload so many xp machines to get them running well again.

People say defragment it, use a reg program to fix it but none of that ever worked, x still ran like a dog after a couple months. The performance degrades on xp badly and this would be one reason companies should look into windows 7.

[sn3rd]

I have to disagree. "Not degrading in performance" is not a good argument for moving over to Windows 7. If configured and maintained correctly, XP will not degrade in performance either.

[PC Direct]

Indeed, XP runs so smooth with a regular reg clean and defrag.

I wonder when XP will become not used anymore...

All the notebooks we sell, 80% of people want Vista to XP downgrades... makes one think.

Can't wait for Windows 7 tho - anything better than Vista is a good thing :)

[cerebus]

In business terms I'm not sure what win7 really does offer over and above xp. It isn't innovative at all. Ok I love win7 really, but in terms of what I can do on it compared to xp - it's about the same honestly. it's prettier and more stable but businesses don't really care about that. XP is very fast on any hardware

[I am Penguin]

Many companies said the same about XP and later Vista. Yet at some point when the software is proven then their It departments will upgrade on their own recommendations to management, specially when improved networking and security is on offer. All it means that big Corporations with large IT departments will not change over immediatly, they are slow adopters of new OS technology for obvious reasons. Not the reasons some naysayers would want you to believe. The cost of hardware upgrades, training of their own support team are only two the main deciding factors/reasons. Then there is budget and capex considerations.

At least be sure, they will also not be installing OSX any time soon either.

[cerebus]

At least be sure, they will also not be installing OSX any time soon either.

LOL this is a peterch thread after all.

[killadoob]

In business terms I'm not sure what win7 really does offer over and above xp. It isn't innovative at all. Ok I love win7 really, but in terms of what I can do on it compared to xp - it's about the same honestly. it's prettier and more stable but businesses don't really care about that. XP is very fast on any hardware

More stable, networking is miles better than xp.

It may not offer more than xp but it does offer a better easier way to do things.

Xp is not fast on old hardware at all, leave xp installed on a celeron with 2gb memory for 6 months and come tell me the pc is running fast.

It is fast when first installed by 6 months later the pc is crawling and taking forever to open word and outlook.

[Bismuth]

We didn't adopt Vista, thank heavens, and probably won't adopt 7 either. At least not on current hardware. Will have to see if certain proprietary software works in 7, because it sure didn't in Vista.

B

[LandyMan]

All our machines are shipped with Windows Vista Business. As they arrive, we reinstall it with a Win7 RC from the start.

[cerebus]

The more I think about it, 4/10 conversion rates isn't a bad result for a new OS. We have clients who still use win98 for goodness' sake. I'd be interested to know how long it took for xp to become ubiquitous, but I'd imagine that win7 will be looking at the same sort of timeframes. In the meantime they are getting a lot of things right out of the door. Reception is better than early XP reception and adoption seems strong.

[blogbytes]

Well vista never suffered it from either, i am not sure what or why it slows down, all i know is xp is nice and fast for 4 weeks or so and then just declines in performance over the next few months

I have to disagree. If you defrag on a regular basis and look after the reg, it stays fast like in the beginning :cool:

Edit: Created: 01 June 2008, 6:31:12 PM

Still runs smooooooth. lol

[killadoob]

I have to disagree. If you defrag on a regular basis and look after the reg, it stays fast like in the beginning :cool:

Edit: Created: 01 June 2008, 6:31:12 PM

Still runs smooooooth. lol

How do you look after the reg, with one of those reg cleaners? that mess up more than they fix?

Cerebus people forget about xp when it was released, buggy as hell and driver support was not great.

[poffle]

We've started adopting 7 as our main OS now. Its working great, dev work, day to day work. Even on our old boxes we reloaded them with 7 and not 1 complaint yet.
XP is still an old favorite atm but i dont see 1 reason why you wouldnt use 7. I have not had 1 driver issue ever.

[blogbytes]

How do you look after the reg, with one of those reg cleaners? that mess up more than they fix?

Cerebus people forget about xp when it was released, buggy as hell and driver support was not great.

Hmm, ya.

I use a app called myuninstaller to remove apps. Once you uninstall apps, the app searches for all keys, strings in the reg and removes them too, where XP will only remove some or none.

If WIN 7 gets released, I will def make the jump from XP to WIN 7. Dont get me wrong, I really dig WIN 7, just a little to scared atm to make a complete move.

[Solitude]

Where I work our machines use Vista and everything runs fine. It does not look like we will be upgrading to Windows 7 in the near future.

[Asha'man X]

With Vista, there was so much changed under the hood that few people really got what it meant. I would say that most of it was targeted at the corporate world, and more so for those using Windows Server 2008, where the best of the product comes out, same like XP and Server 2003.

Vista is a hell of a lot more secure than XP, it was built from the ground up to face todays threats. UAC was actually a good thing though few seem to think so because of how annoying and perhaps poorly implemented it was. I leave it on though, and in combination with my AV software I feel more secure than when I was on XP with 3 security products....

As for the slowing down XP thing, I can confirm that it is real and happens, though it seems to be somewhat random. Some machines don't suffer it while others do. No amount of reg cleaning and defragging works, been there tried that. I'm not running old or weak hardware either. That sluggish issue is one of the reasons I also moved onto Vista.

Anyway, this is all off topic, but I can say that my work won't be upgrading to Win 7 anytime soon. We only now looking to move to Vista, since we got it for peanuts thanks to the SA School Agreement between Microsoft and the government.