I'm okay with someone saying, as you are, that migrating from XP to Vista doesn't offer significant advantages in their specific environment. I get that. It makes sense.
My complaint is with the people who essentially say that Vista sucks, and anyone who buys it is an idiot. People who refuse to recognize that in some environments, it IS worthwhile. And that sad fact is that many IT professionals are guilty of this. I've had friends and family members come to me and say they were looking to buy a new computer, but were scared to because their IT person at work told them it was terrible. For our situation, we saw advantages. After testing and finding that compatibility was virtually a non-issue in our environment, we started ordering all new computers with Vista installed. We've never regretted it. John -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 12:31 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Gone way OT: Windows 7 On TechNet Now On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 8:24 AM, John Hornbuckle <[email protected]> wrote: > And as you say, Vista isn't nearly as bad as the FUD-spreaders would have > people believe. Of course, neither is Linux. I must admit, the Linux fan in me is somewhat amused to see Microsoft falling victim to one of their own favorite tricks. I have a hard time dredging up any sympathy for Ballmer and company. Especially when they're obviously trying real hard to get people to move off XP to Vista/7, when many of their paying customers are apparently are saying we'd rather not. > ... just plain unwilling to learn something new. A big part of my objection to Vista (as an IT management weenie) is that the apparent improvements don't warrant the apparent costs of the changes. The ROI just isn't there. Aside from the learning curve, there's lots of incompatibilities. Drivers. MSIE 7. Roaming profiles. UI. Sure, those incompatibilies only affect existing stuff -- guess what, we've got existing stuff we have to worry about. So does 99% of the rest of the world. If there were some radical improvements -- like there were with the 95/98/NT4 -> 2000/XP switch -- it would be one thing. But I frankly just don't see it with XP -> Vista. Image-based deployment? We've already invested time/effort/money in RIS here, and now we're supposed to invest in something different that does the same thing. BitLocker? Licensing issues make it non-viable for all but very large companies. Better GPOs? Don't help our 100 or so existing XP stations. It seems like the major added capabilities in Vista are Aero, DirectX 10, and home multimedia stuff. Fine for home users, I guess. But none are something I want in a business environment. Indeed, in business, *we want a consistent UI*. Otherwise support, training, and documentation all become more expensive. Likewise, a big part of the reason we haven't deployed Office 2007 anywhere is the radical UI change. Sure, people can get used to it. Sure, it's arguably an improvement in some ways. But guess what? Throwing out 25 years of working UI conventions for a very marginal improvement in usability is just plain not worth it. It's like the auto industry engineers who keep trying to replace the steering-wheel/pedals/shifter arrangement. Sure, it might be possible to do things a little better, but it's simply not worth the effort of teaching hundreds of millions of people how to drive all over again. Heck, the very thing that keeps many people on the Microsoft platform is that it isn't worth the pain and drawbacks of switching to something Linux or Mac. When it comes right down to it, a computer's pretty much a computer, regardless of the software you're using. All the various offerings have their strengths and weaknesses. But throwing out something that mostly-works just to replace it with something else that will mostly-work is a bad value proposition. So Vista isn't the train wreck some say it is, but it also didn't provide Microsoft a good ROI for the huge amount of time and money they spent making it. Maybe it will pay off eventually by making it easier to introduce improvements in future versions of Windows, but I kinda doubt it. In 50+ years of the IT industry history, such scenarios have rarely paid off. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
