Bad News For Ballmer & Co. – Enterprise Still In No Hurry for Windows 7

While many individuals are changing over to Windows 7, the folks who are in control of making the changes at the workplace still are not convinced. This time, it’s not because the IT managers don’t like Windows 7, it  is because they are not anxious to make a jump to something that is different enough to require new training for the employees, and the possibility of new hardware.

It’s also because Windows XP is something that works without problems. It has been refined more than any other operating system that Microsoft has released, and so things are working better and smoother than with any other operating system. Eight years of evolution has made Windows XP the monkey that Microsoft cannot get off its back.

The story from those IT pros is detailed in ComputerWorld, and we find that many companies are simply going to continue to ‘hang back’ and wait for the first update cycle to Windows 7 before purchasing.

Consumers may appear to be snapping up Windows 7, but large companies won’t, according to CIOs interviewed this week.

IT leaders who spoke to Computerworld at the Society for Information Management’s SIMposium 09 conference this week in Seattle say their companies remain almost completely running Windows XP on the desktop.

Despite the eight years that have passed since XP’s release, they expressed little urgency to upgrade to Windows 7.

Peter Whatnell, CIO for Sunoco Inc., said the petroleum retailer won’t move to Windows 7 for at least two years.

“There’s nothing driving us to go to that new environment, because of the nature of our company and our industry,” said Whatnell.

Sunoco has 8,500 employees, but only 1,000 have PCs. All of them run XP. Most were upgraded to Office 2003 only at the beginning of this year.

While Sunoco mostly runs Microsoft software, it is also what Whatnell calls Sunoco an “N minus 1″ shop, meaning that the company is at least one — and often two — versions behind the latest software release.

I’m sure there will be many on the N-2 path, as many companies are totally bypassing Vista. There were plenty of copies of Vista hanging around, but they were put on the back shelf, because the immediate response to Vista was ‘Yuck!” and the downgrade rights were used to return to Windows XP.

“Windows 7 runs like a champ on my personal netbook, but we don’t really need it,” he said.

Chubb Corp. is just starting to plan its testing and rollout of Windows 7, said CIO Jim Knight. “We will do [the upgrade], but it will be slow and steady,” he said. The Warren, N.J.-based insurer has 10,000 employee PCs, all on XP.

Enterprises have traditionally waited until the arrival of the first service pack before upgrading Windows, if not later. But Microsoft likely hopes that pent-up demand from enterprises would cause a faster uptake.

Microsoft reaps its highest profits from enterprise agreements. Such licenses, which require the purchase of three-year Software Assurance maintenance agreements, result in corporations paying nearly twice the full license price of Windows over that period.

Whoa! Does anyone really need to be that ‘assured’?

By comparison, a consumer buying a new PC gets an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) license of Windows, which is sold by Microsoft to the PC manufacturer at a huge discount to the list price.

Mueller Water Products Inc. also doesn’t expect to begin rolling out Windows 7 to its 2,200 desktops for another 18 to 24 months.

“We have been playing with the Windows 7 betas,” said Bob Keefe, CIO of the Atlanta manufacturer. “We certainly like it more than Vista.”

None of the CIOs said they were deploying either Mac or Linux computers in significant numbers, not even Curt Pederson, CIO of Oregon State University.

Oregon State’s Open Source Lab hosts a number of open-source projects in its data centers for public download. They include the Apache Web server, Drupal content management system, Gentoo Linux, the Linux kernel itself, and others. OSU also runs mostly open-source software in its back-end infrastructure.

But Pederson says deep educational discounts, combined with faculty interest in staying on Windows and Microsoft Office, keeps the 3,000 desktops that his group manages on XP.

OSU plans to deploy Windows 7 in staggered rollouts of new PCs, though Pederson said a timetable has not been decided.

As much as I would like to see another operating system to give a serious run at Microsoft, it won’t be Linux for awhile. I’ve seen that with the move from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. Too many changes seem to have been made for no reason other than to appear different. Someone seems to have acquired a bad case of Microsoft-itis, and it really makes it hard to keep people up to speed on how things work.

As much as people say they want things to be different, most of them don’t. They want what is familiar. There needs to be a differentiation between the version of any OS designed for long usage, by the ‘computer as an appliance’ crowd, and the ‘computer is a living, changing, growing entity.

So, though I’m sure that Microsoft will want to change Windows 7 look and feel in 3 years, if they pay attention to the customer needs and wants, they’ll stay with the same look it has today. Too many changes are not good in the UI. Microsoft would know that if they came out of the caves in Redmond more often,

I’ve said it before, but it still applies, the most popular OS in the world should be like the Volkswagen Beetle, it changed little from 1949 to 1975, but each year, in places where it counted, the engine, the electrical system, the brakes, etc., it continued to get better and better. It was familiar in the right places, making it easy to drive, and superior to the years before in performance, making it exciting once behind the wheel.

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