There's no two ways about it -- Microsoft has moved
a truckload of Windows Vista licenses. That said, just 10 percent of all PCs within enterprises in North America and Europe use
Vista, with the vast majority sticking to what has worked for years:
Windows XP. Company CEO Steve Ballmer had quite the zinger on this topic during a recent interview at an NYC interview to mark the extension of Microsoft's collaboration with EMC, and we're certain you'll love it. Here goes: "If you deploy a four or five-year old operating system today [Windows XP], most people will ask their boss why the heck they don't have the stuff [Vista / Windows 7] they have at home." Of course, a one-off remark from some chap that's not at all pertinent to the day-to-day operations of a company isn't apt to make a business owner
rethink their approach to running their own show, but we're sure it's fun for Steve to think that only a handful of consumers out there are
still relying on WinXP.
[Via
PCWorld]
posted Feb 5th 2009 8:04PM
I use Vista, and love it, but isn't it easier/cheaper to stick with what works? I mean, its not like companies have alot of money to throw around these days...
Exactly. Why spend a bunch of money on a new OS with a new paint job a few new features that honestly aren't all that great?
...and that will make those 2-to-3-year-old PCs run slow as hell, if at all.
Wait for 7, people...srsly.
Where I work, we just converted all 5000 machine to XP from Win 2k. We are not changing to Vista or Win7 for many years.
I have a genuine OEM version of Vista Home and I ditched that piece of sh*t weeks ago after bearing it for more than a year. Now I got a torrented copy of XP, the "Performance Edition" which blows Vista away by a billion lightyears. I don't care if I am using unlicensed OS, because the licensed Vista is pain pain pain and WinXP is joy joy joy and enjoy.
See this tiny 3 cell battery? It went from 1h:30m (Vista) to a full two and a half hours (XP). JOY!
See this cold start bootup from 5+ minutes (Vista) to a blazing less than a minute (XP)? JOY!
15-20 FPS on heavy games (Vista) to 30-40 FPS (XP)? JOY!
Youtube HD, Vimeo HD and 720p streaming without dropped frames? ENJOY!
"...will make those 2-to-3-year-old PCs run slow as hell, if at all."
What the fuck? A PC from 2007 won't run Vista? Please.
@Aguilez
Everything you cited there was bullshit. Nobody who reads Engadget is going to believe that you added an HOUR OF LIFE to your battery, took FIVE DAMN MINUTES to boot Vista, and gained 20FPS by switching to XP. Oh, and suddenly can watch 720p. What is to be gained from lying your ass off in a comment?!
yeah, as far as a business...i'd stick w/ what works. but if i knew what works will only be supported for a couple more month - well, that'd probably make me change my mind
(Whoops, forgot to press reply and my comment is at the bottom... Reposting...)
AVG:
Have you tried switching from Vista to XP?
"HOUR OF LIFE"
- An hour is taken away with all that Aeroglass tat plus all the clutter applications I have running with constant 5-10% use of the CPU.
"FIVE DAMN MINUTES"
- On a 512MB RAM, 64MB is allocated for the graphics so it's like 448MB.
"20FPS by switching to XP"
- On an old Need for Speed game (Underground 2)
"suddenly can watch 720p"
- I can watch 720p on Vista.... With dropped frames. XP has minimum dropped frames.
@Aguiluz:
Im looking at my processor usage and seeing 0% - 2% usage right now on Vista.
And from "Starting" to ready to use in about a minute and a bit.
Underground 2 is an unoptimized pile of garbage that EA didnt give a shit about. They saw that it ran poorly on Vista (their own fault since very few games exhibit the performance loss from XP to Vista now, and some even gain performance) and did nothing about it.
720P video here on my AAOne on Vista with no dropped frames.
And if you knew anything about setting up a PC, you would have figured out how to disable things you dont need. Vista can be made just as light weight as XP with vLight.
@Aguilez
Reposting a lie doesn't suddenly make it true.
@Aguiluz
I believe you. With Aero turned off, your grafx card isn't doing much of anything normally. Also XP doesn't have indexing on by default, so the HD should stay nice and cool. Those are probably the two big things. On the other hand you could probably turn those features off in Vista and get improved battery life.
With XP, my T42 Thinkpad gets 7.5 hours; on kubuntu with kde 4.2 and compositing on, its around 4. Ok, apples and oranges, but I don't have a copy of Vista to play around with.
SimbaDogg, XP is supported until 8 April 2014 not "a couple more months".
About Vista and battery life on laptops.
I was hired in on a pilot project last year rolling out Vista for a multinational company. They had XP and where going to Vista. Vista was a bag of hurt for them to put it mildly.
Laptop users did actually experience a plunge in battery time. I think it was due to Vista caching data from network drives or something like that. The disks where always working even when the user wasn't doing anything. This lead to lower battery life and a horrid user experience as the disk was busy when the user actually wanted it to do something else.
I was working with e-mail transistion and application testing so I didn't get to hear the end of the story before I left that misery of a project. This might have been some due to some policy on the domain level but when I left they still hadn't figured it out and plenty of users where begging to keep XP.
There where a lot of user who had to keep XP because a lot of their apps didn't work on Vista. That's of course not necessarily Vista's fault but for the corporations who are dependent on the apps don't care about that as much as they care about it having to work.
IMO:
Actually Micro$oft doesn't care about what business needs. Their thoughts go this way: if on your workplace you have a PC running Vista, you will, most likely, install it at home as well, thus increasing the amount of licenses sold.
@AVG Actually alot of laptops and medium to low range desktops from 2007 cant run vista for fuck pre or post SP1. GMA 950 or worse my friend, Dont you remember all of Works with Vista problems, THAT was in 2007.
Do you work for Microsoft? That is the only reason i can even think of for you saying the dribble that your spewing.
And as far as deploying vista in a workplace, MS would have to pay me per machine to teach people wtf a UAC was and why it was asking them stupid questions all the time. And then we still couldnt use 1/2 of our Estimation software.
Its one thing to defend your favorite OS, i get that. But its another to call out someone as a liar when you are just making crap up as you go along.
@Ruben You should never have to run a 3rd party program to make your OS "Light" or useable. When you build a feature for an OS, it should be a feature and not a hindrance.
@Dillinger
You're a fucking idiot. Any laptop built in 2007 can run Vista. The thing can run on a 1GHz machine for Christ's sake. The "built for Vista" controversy was just about Premium features, such as Aero, not being accessible although the machine claims to be Vista capable. Get your shit together.
The comments in this thread in brief:
Windows Vista sucks.
No it doesn't.
Mac is the best.
Fanboi.
Linux is a more sensible solution in this economic times.
Linux sucks.
Yeah it sucks.
No it doesn't.
Vista runs fast on my wrist watch and/or microwave oven.
Windows 7 will do some amazing stuff.
No it won't.
[rinse and repeat as necesary]
The truth? Ballmer might be right, but they messed up with Vista, so they have to regain trust from their business base, mainly because that's the market that generates the most income to Microsoft.
Full disclaimer: I hope 7 is better, I love Leopard and use Ubuntu.
where i worked over the summer, my machine still ran win2k, it did everything it needed to. the only reason some employees were using xp, was because they couldnt get win2k from their computer provider anymore
Were I still able to, I would be using Win2k right now.
As it is, I'm running 7/XP, simply because a lot of stuff isn't supported by Win2k anymore.
Same here, Win 2K runs on all our computers at work because it, well, works.
Ballmer has a point, especially from younger employees who keep up with the latest tech. Those types are going to know that Vista doesn't deserve the bad rap and are going to question companies that still keep XP around. I use VIsta in a company of XP machines and people are always asking me why the rest of the company doesn't have it.
Oh well, we are going to WIndows 7 so it doesn't matter.
Most companies are slow to migrate to a new version of an OS because they may have compatibility issues with some applications, or reluctant to commit to new hardware purchases to accommodate VISTA's requirements.
With budgets as tight as they are, vista would have to present a super compelling reason or benefit to invest in something new and shiny
Upgrading from 98 to 2000/XP made a lot of sense to business, because the remote support capabilities and OS lockdown were a massive benefit. But going to Vista doesn't really give IT departments the same major benefit for the cost of upgrading all their computers. So, there's no real point in upgrading if everything works within the network - plus there were some problems that was just not worth the hassle. Home users that only have a simple wi-fi network just don't realise that there's a stackload of crap that has to be done in their IT department to make sure everything works and that it won't cause help desk calls to increase 1000%. But if Win7 introduces some really good tech utilities to improve stability and IT support efficiency, then IT departments will switch really quickly.
The companies that likely have draconian (and usually arbitrary) restrictions like that are often the kind of companies that block you from installing Firefox because they can't push updates to it.
They're also the kind of company that young people generally see as stagnant and unable to innovate.
Balmer has a pretty poor point, even if you exclude the competition from it. Not that long ago, Microsoft touted separate operating systems for home and work (Windows and Windows NT). And even now, sure, Vista might not be quite as bad as people pan it to be, but it does change a lot. Reeducating your workforce isn't cheep, nor is reengineering apps to work on a new OS. XP works for these companies, and they don't see the compelling need to deal with Vista.
Factoring in outside products into Balmer's statement only helps to defeat it as well. Most companies are not going to invest in OS X or Linux due to people using it at home. So why should they invest in Vista just because users have it at home?
I can't believe so many people can't read between the lines with Ballmer. The reason why peoples' home machines run newer versions of Windows than work machines is that home machines are required to be sold with Vista. Ballmer is essentially reasoning that because Microsoft forces OEMs to ship Vista on their boxes, businesses should follow suit. Nice bit of sophistry, but what do you expect?
Last decade was the Windows 95 era. This decade it's clearly Windows XP. Eight years and it's still the standard in many companies.
In business I think you mean last decade was dominated by Windows NT 4.0? Or at a stretch Windows for Workgroups.
95 wasn't exactly built for business - though I appreciate it did make the odd appearance.
Yeah, i meant only XP when I said about companies.
This decade is almost over, what's going to step in?
*cough* Win 7 *cough*
I think as long as there are minimal compatibility issues it will be the OS of the next decade because it runs well on older hardware meaning no need to update that too in most cases.
I would actually say that for most of this decade it was win2k.
Companies (other than computer related work) change OS when they change the computers. It will slowly move to the next level.
hell its a standard in my house, lol I love XP
Yep, I bought several new computers last year and rip out Vista from everyone of them. Install XP for my wife and parents, the rest are on OpenSuSE.
Deploy WinXP now and make us lose money because you won't want to deploy Windows 7 in a year.
deploy vista and face MORE concerns from employees
I think it is Microsoft's own mistake that they still are giving extensions on XP license and support.
I personally think that people around the globe are ready to stick with XP forever if Microsoft gave them chances. Companies want cheap stuff, stuff that they already know how to run in less than a second. If Microsoft is serious about companies adopting Vista or 7, they should either offer it for really cheap, or just cut support on XP immediately.
Vista is amazing, but the extreme bad to No support ruined its chances for success, and Windows 7 can fall right behind Vista if things stay the same.
If I had a company I would deploy Vista and abuse every nice feature in it, but I would not do it if I have a better deal for XP.
Microsoft, it's your job, not anyone else's.
I completely agree!
The problem of Vista is that all new software still works on XP. Including Microsoft's own goodies like .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio, MS Office 2007, et. al. So there is no need for companies to switch, since everything "just works".
If MS cuts support for new apps on XP then it will be another story. Then all geek community will raise and curse Microsoft into oblivion. So the problem is not that Vista is bad, the problem is that XP is too good and compatible.
New computers will slowly push Vista and W7 onto consumers and businesses, but XP will stay there until the last piece of pre-2007 hardware dies. Which will be another 10 years easily. Or at least until hard economic times are over.
Personally I like Vista and W7, but I am not a business with a burden of hundreds of old workstations and no money to upgrade.
BTW, looks like even the slowest companies like IBM had upgraded their apps to be Vista compatible. So there is no reason to hold to XP except for money issues.
So you support the idea the Microsoft can FORCE millions of companies (and possibly competitors) into upgrading to a more expensive system simply by shutting off all support?
Wow.
Andir3.0, you know what is the real problem about this "cheaper" issue that you are talking about?
It creates an endless loop of downfall.
Whenever Vista gets cheaper XP will also get cheaper than Vista, basically XP will always be cheaper, until when? It is endless.
Whenever Vista gets faster, XP will also get faster than Vista, so XP will always be faster. Endless.
Do you want to use a 1996 NOKIA phone forever just because it is more stable than the new ones?
Do you want to watch analog TV forever just because it is free and easier to setup?
No and No, people must advance. You will buy a new phone although it has less battery time because you adapt to new technology, and you buy an HD tv with new cables because you want to take advantage of the new era of video broadcast.
Stability in technology does not come from the company alone, it comes from people using it and feedbacks. Vista introduces a lot of new technology advancements where if used right could speed up our work flow, but if companies focus on creating hardware or software to run on old OS's we will not see any good use of these new technologies.
Shutting off support on XP is like Dad holding candy from his kids; it seems mean, but it is for the a better and healthier future.
So I say Microsoft should end the support on XP and ask people to upgrade as soon as possible.
1. I should be able to use that 1996 Nokia phone if it still works. That's my choice.
2. I should also be able to use analog TV if I wanted to. Unfortunately, our dip shit country is turning socialist. Yes, I like HD... but I should NOT be forced to upgrade to it. Period.
3. You think of Microsoft as a father? Weird.
Andir3.0, dear, my point still stands solid.
1. Many (if not all) 1996 phones do not work now due to network upgrades, so you are forced to adapt and buy a new one, no choice, of course this is all for the good of humanity.
2. Thank you for pointing that honestly.
3. My example is just to point out the situation of taking of something from you, not to say that Microsoft is our lord or father!
You see what I mean?
No, you are essentially stating the you think Microsoft knows better than you do. You have given up your free will and choice to a company in the guise of "betterment of humanity" or some other illogical conclusion.
The point I'm making: If my grandmother doesn't want to go out and spend money on a new TV receiver, she shouldn't have to. Just like HD Radio, they offer both broadcasts. HD Radio has to sell itself in quality and tune-ability. If people find value in such a transition... they will buy it. Otherwise you are not providing enough incentive (and improvement of their experience) to do so. If Microsoft were serious about "the betterment of humanity" they would provide enough of a selling point or a lower cost to entice people to their new OS. So far, people haven't seen that and don't want to spend the money.
There is absolutely no reason for forcing people to upgrade operating systems. Period. In fact, I find it disturbing that Microsoft has the power to decide that upgrade timespan. They should be forced to support all their operating systems until a majority (>90%) of their customer base upgrades. Their business should be driven by customer needs, not their own (or yours.)
Andir3.0,
Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 3.1, what are you going to do now?
Apple forces you to buy their own OS inside their machines, what are you going to do?
You web hosting company upgraded into a new system, what are going to do?
You network doesn't support phones from 1996, what will you do to them?
In order to sign in to Xbox Live you must upgrade your system to the new look, what will you do?
Hundreds and hundreds of things that upgrade around you without giving you a choice. People complain, then adapt. It is that simple.
Microsoft isn't better than us, but we are also not better than them.
People can't see change until they see it, If people are happy with XP, a better version for them would seem weired and unnecessary.
It's companies' duty to upgrade people to better solutions.
The majority will never upgrade, unless they are forced, then feedback pops in and better products emerge.
@Andir 3.0
Just like you have a choice to use older hardware/software/stuff, companies have the choice to stop supporting it. Don't just assume Microsoft does it. Lots of new Mac software only works on OSX with Intel Mac's. I'm sure there is a point where Linux draws the line on hardware it supports. New versions of Firefox don't run on anything pre-2000. Is this a bad thing? No. Supporting older hardware/software would make operating system bloated pieces of garbage. At the very least, appreciate that Microsoft has been kind enough to make a lot of its products run on older OS's, even if it hurts their bottom line. But there comes a point at which they have to cut you off and make you upgrade, as they are a buissness, not Linux.
Microsoft isn't holding a gun to your head to upgrade. You just can't get used to the thought of trying something new and unfamiliar. Whatever happened to your sense of adventure?
Don't bother arguing with Andir, he trolls all Microsoft related articles.
saad , i have to disagree.
microsoft isnt introduving xp for the betterment of humanity , rather ms has gotten used to putting a new os out every couple of years to a) improve the os/add new needed technology and b) make a shitload of money.
now however we are at a stage where xp is pretty damn good at what it does and the new os isnt really adding anything at all but microsoft is used to making all that extra revenue every few years and so wants us to move to vista.
There's a difference in dropping support for a minor part of your customer base and dropping support for a major part to force them into upgrading.
If there are 5 people using Windows 98... sure, drop it. There's no point. If there's 30-50% of your customer base still using XP... you have no right to drop support.
This has nothing to do with my preferences. (Well, maybe a little, but I mainly use Debian at home and XP at work)
And for the record... Linux doesn't drop support for old hardware until the last person using it does...
@sinjinn:
Exactly. If Microsoft was really concerned about providing a better experience for their users... they should be offering a service pack for XP that includes those "helpful" features.