On Nov 20, 1:32 pm, "ness...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<ness...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> <Quote>
> The majority of IT professionals worry that migrating to Windows Vista
> will make their networks less stable and more complex, according to a
> new survey....
>
> The survey, echoing one from Forrester last week, shows most IT
> professionals are worried about Vista
According to the article, 90% were worried about Vista.
Many companies are purchasing new machines with Windows XP and don't
realize that what they are really purchasing is Windows Vista Business
edition which is then "downgraded" to ship the machine with Windows XP
Professional.
And if the tech department isn't nixing Vista, the legal department
and financial department are putting the brakes on migration to
Vista. Most CEOs have directed their CIO and CTO to be prepared to
switch to Linux if Microsoft tried another "forced upgrade" similar to
the one they used to "force feed" XP into corporations.
This may be one of the reasons that Microsoft has extended permission
for OEMs to offer Windows XP for 18 months instead of the original 12
months. Meanwhile, more companies are taking the preliminary actions
required to make a smooth transition to Linux. They are promoting the
use of FireFox web browsers, making sure that employees can do what
they need to do with FireFox. They are deploying OpenOffice and using
OO or ODF based documents as the standard exchange format between team
members. More companies are using ODF or PDF as their "standard"
output format.
> and that 44% have considered non-Windows operating systems,
> such as Linux and Macintosh,
It's possible that Mac will be used as a way to get executives who
don't want to learn Linux on board. Many companies have also begun to
offer VMWare images that can be used with VMWare Player as a way to
"introduce" employees to Linux. Many companies have also opted to own
their XP licenses, which means that they can transfer them to new
"Windows" machines and run XP as a VMWare client.
There is a very real possibility that as many as 44% of these largest
companies have already made such transition plans, offering the option
of "Hybrid" systems based on Linux with Windows clients - for
deployment to employee workstations and laptops.
> to avoid the Microsoft migration.
Most people only look at the license fees and basic upgrade costs.
They often forget that upgrades often require contractors, time to
back-up and recover data to network storage or USB hard drives, extra
time to configure and deploy 3rd party applications, and configuration
of custom applications. The cost of installing all of these things
into a Windows system, especially a major upgrade such as upgrading
from XP to Vista can be very expensive.
In addition, if hardware needs to be upgraded or replaced, the price
can go even higher. The big problem is that labor costs for
contractors can cost as much as $100 per hour, and additional costs of
lost employee productivity can push the cost to as much as $5,000 per
machine.
In addition to this, many of the least technical people require the
most additional re-training. The costs can exceed $5 million per
1,000 employees. For an organization such as IBM with 450,000
employees, or an organization such as Prudential with 100,000 PC user
employees, the logistics can go into the $billions.
Microsoft cooked it's own goose by trying to make Vista an "all or
nothing" proposition. By trying to sabotage Linux, Lotus Notes, and
other third party applications, Microsoft has made Vista "non-grata"
and any attempt to force upgrades to Vista will probably trigger a
hard-core push-back by switching as many systems as possible to Linux
and then licensing only the bare minumum number of machines that must
run Windows under extended XP licenses.
This very much resembles the attempt by Microsoft to force upgrades
from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. Each time
Microsoft tried to declare NT 4.0 "obsolete", they found that
customers, instead of forking over as much as $20,000 per processor
for enterprise licenses to Windows 2000 or Windows 2003, were opting
to switch as many systems as possible to Linux or Unix. In many
cases, several windows systems were replaced with a substantially
smaller number of Unix or Linux servers, and often the total cost of
the Linux or Unix hardware was lower than the various redundant
Windows servers, and FAR below the cost of those enterprise Windows
licenses.
In many cases, vendors such as Oracle and IBM even allowed customers
to convert their Windows licenses to Linux or Unix licenses at little
or no additional cost.
> </Quote>
>
> http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/infrastructure/applications...
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