Heh. Microsoft is all but pleading with people to upgrade to Vista

[thewayne]

Amusing. I'm not saying this from a Mac-centric perspective because I live in both worlds, I'm saying this because it's pretty apparent that Vista wasn't ready for prime time when it was released. You have a much chance for success and a good user experience if you're buying brand-new hardware with it, but not many can afford to run out and buy replacement PCs. We're largely ignoring Vista for as long as possible at work because we just don't trust it. It could also be said that we trust it to be not terribly stable or compatible with existing apps. We're just now rolling out Internet Explorer v7 across the City because we had some horrible problems with it when the help desk pushed it after their alleged testing. And as soon as we started rolling it across our enterprise last week, we started getting more calls about things that just don't work. *sigh*

I don't trust my personal hardware to run Vista well. I know my work PC won't run it well, it's sluggish under my normal workload under XP Pro, and that's with 1.5gig ram in it! We don't have the budget to replace PCs in job lots, so it ain't gonna happen soon. We basically have a policy that we won't role out Microsoft technology until SP1 or later because of Microsoft's proven record of the v1.0 product that you buy actually being a late beta and still not ready for prime time. An awful lot of corporations do the same thing for the same reason, we can't afford to have apps break that are vital to our work.

I don't care that MS is pleading that people not wait until SP1. They have proven from their past actions that you're much better off waiting until after SP1 is out for deploying their software.

Anyway, here's the story: http://apcmag.com/6458/dont_wait_for_vista_sp1_pleads_microsoft

Here's the Slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/20/0643241

Comments

[trayce.livejournal.com]

Heh. I have no intention to move to vista in a hurry, even less so than the 3.1 to 95 move. My brother rang me the other day with a new pc complaning that dialup was slow. He was on vista - I couldn't help him. Ive no idea what its fuckups are. I like XP, I really do.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

XP Pro is an extremely solid platform, and Vista gives us no overwhelmingly compelling reason to upgrade. So why should we? There are going to be a lot of corps who will wait until XP hits utter end of life re: service/support before they upgrade, unless MS comes up with a killer reason for us to upgrade.

[trayce.livejournal.com]

Yeah OS wise I have had zero problems with XP compared to 95/98. No major crashes or weirdness at all, drivers installing smoothly, games working fine, etc. Why would I change?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

It's all perspective. Dos was stable (as I recall). Win 3.1/WFW 3.11 was rocky. I never worked much with 95, we went pretty much straight into NT 3/3.51/4. 98 was a definite improvement over 95, then came ME! What a POS. I fortunately avoided that mess, but I had friends and family who did not. I went straight to Win2000 Pro then much later to XP Pro.

As I recall, XP Pro had a rocky release until SP1 came out. I didn't buy it until after SP2 was released.

[deborak]

Yay! Plead on, Microsoft! Conning more companies into rolling it out = more $ for Bill to teach them how to deal with it. ;-)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Yep! Good for Bill, bad for us who are actually in the trenches!

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

That's about what I'd been figuring personally, too. A lot of times, the new OS's released by Microsoft are more like POS's. Remember Windows Millennium Edition (ME)? Supposed to be another great advance, that sank like a stone. I know one person who still uses it, but the vast majority of mankind didn't want to be bothered with another buggy panacea.

Not to mention the lack of compatibility and hardware issues with this release.

I'm really starting to wonder if Bill Gates is living in a la-la land approximately equivalent to that of Michael Jackson.

[silveradept]

Hah. Microsoft just wants legions of unpaid beta testers for the OS, rather than sinking sufficient man-hours into the product to ensure that it's actually a stable, non-buggy, non-immediately-exploitable operating system. All I've seen for reasons to upgrade are "shiny" reasons, rather than anything on functionality. No thanks, I'll wait until I have to upgrade, and then I'll just keep it around for those few occasions where I do have to have Windows.