Vista II - the saga continues

March 1st, 2007 at 03:27am David Bush - Iasta

Yesterday, I checked around some of my favorite blogs at the end of the day and saw the explosion of activity that Jason caused on Spend Matters by railing the new Vista OS and Office 2007 that was shipped with his new laptop from Dell. At last check, there were over 50 comments posted which shames even the most controversial purchasing topics. There was even strong indications that MSFT spinners or mercs were lurking in his comments to discredit his problems and claims.

This was quite interesting to read and amazing to see how a topic like Microsoft and the love/hate relationship they have with consumers can commandeer a series of posts. In fact, I posted my own observations about Vista, which I wrote early this month. My lack of an explosive title or advice for corporate IT did keep the topic quiet but some of those comments that were posted Tuesday, I find very hard to believe.

I got my first question about Vista this week, and it was out of curiosity. I see no evidence that IT departments are rushing out to install this OS. Frankly, I think it would be a mistake to lead the charge on something this big since it is obvious that the pieces don’t fit quite right yet. The point of my post previously was that changes by Microsoft can, and frequently do, cause very big problems. In the past, we have had to spend weeks of development to fix things that used to work, but magically stopped working for no reason, when a critical update or SP was released. For example, an IE6 hotfix release caused us to spend multiple days getting our Print Screen functionality to work again, after it had worked flawlessly for 4 years. There are many similar examples. We have tested Iasta SmartSource with pre-release versions of Vista and IE7 over the past year and thankfully only very small changes were necessary, which were transparently delivered to our clients before the new MSFT products were released.

These are complicated moving parts when you deal with applications, operating systems, hardware and the Internet. Jumping to Vista will likely cause problems for at least some of your other legacy corporate applications. Most large corporations that we talk with everyday are rightly taking a cautious wait-and-see approach by validating the new OS with their applications and at least waiting for SP1s of both Vista and Office 2007 before undertaking major rollouts. By the time the service packs are released, it will certainly be more stable and will be embraced more readily by corporations… probably starting in earnest in late ‘07 and early ‘08. And hopefully hardware will have gotten faster and less expensive in that time period as well. It just does not make sense for IT to fix something that is not broken and spend a lot of money upgrading software and hardware (as relatively new equipment and a lot of memory is required for acceptable performance) as long as XP and Office 2003 “just work”.

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Entry Filed under: General, Technology / SaaS