"Responding to feedback from customers and third parties, Microsoft has extended the availability of Windows XP to both original equipment manufacturers and retail channels through to June 30, 2008. Originally slated to be pulled from retail shelves and OEMs on January 30, 2008 - only a year after Windows Vista's debut - customers requested more time to prepare for the upgrade to Vista."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Agreed.
The multinational I work for has Solaris servers in each location, and Windows desktops.
Windows 2000 desktops to be precise.
We have a mixture of Linux and Windows XP on the personal machines they give us. The laptops and the lab machines, but the main network is still Windows 2000.
We have a few test machines with Vista on them, but, so far, they are useless as they are not compatible with the scripts in use by our network admins.
We run 24/7 and if someone in Singapore has a computer problem, the admins from UK or Brazil will remotely have a look, and fix it. Using our tools Vista will let them look, but not touch.
When a machine dies, it is replaced, sometimes with a machine with Vista, but it is immediately formatted, and Windows 2000 installed.
Until we re-write all the admin tools, we will not have a rollout to either XP or Vista.
Member since:2007-05-24
Member since:2006-12-28
Good point and no offense but the amount of times, usually on a departmental basis, some fool of a manager has pushed the idea of an upgrade for whatever reason has been a large bone of contention for both myself and many sys admins I have worked with.
Only recently, in my experience, have companies started to take the 'IT guys' allot more seriously. I remember one bank I was working for where a director decided that he absolutely had to run his Minidisc NetMD apps on his company workstation. We where running Win2k on all our internal desktops at the time, yet he needed WinXP to be fully compatible with his home setup.
At the time, we had lots of internally developed apps that where having teething problems with XP, and the reason why we hadn't even considered upgrading was the relative immaturity of pre-SP1 WinXP. But all these arguments fell on deaf ears.
As far as this (financial) director was concerned, if his desktop could not run the latest version of his app, then there was something fundamentally wrong with the OS and we, the IT department, where just a bunch of lazy sods for not having upgraded the entire bank's PCs. It took our manager two weeks of all kinds of tactics to stop a company wide roll out of WinXP, because telling your boss that he should mind his own department requires quite a delicate touch.
Granted, it has been a few years since I was in a similar situation, but you make it sound like this kind of situation doesn't happen. Believe me, it happens all the time.
Member since:
2005-07-06
"I certainly would not like to be involved with a forced upgrade for a large company with many custom or in house apps that need tweaking for them to run on Vista."
You make it sound like it's such a cut-and-dry decision for large companies to just say "hmm...let's move to an entirely new platform." That is not the case, and most certainly if they have mission critical apps that were designed to run on XP, then they most definitely wouldn't just upgrade for the sake of upgrading. New platforms have to offer some sort of value for new application development...convincing companies to rewrite existing apps is a lose-lose scenario.
I work in IT (as a programmer) for a Global 500 company, and Vista isn't even on our 12 month horizon. We'll actually upgrade most of our servers to Windows Server 2008 long before we start general deployment of Vista to the desktop for one reason alone: The value is many times more apparent.