Study: Just Six Percent of American Business PCs can run Vista Premium
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A new study by Softchoice Corp. has found that about half of the average business PCs in North America are unable to meet the minimum requirements for Windows Vista, while 94 percent do not meet the requirements for Vista Premium. |
In comparison, when Windows XP was released, some 71 percent of the PCs met its system requirements, Softchoice services consultant Dean Williams said in an executive summary of the report, which is expected to be released later this week.
"This difference suggests that jump in system requirements to run Vista presents a significant barrier to adoption," he said.
In addition, twelve percent of the of 112,113 desktops from 472 North American organizations surveyed, will require CPU replacements to run Vista in its minimum configuration, while 16 percent will require CPU replacements to run Vista in its premium configuration, Williams said.
Williams attributes the poor state of hardware readiness among North American companies to the sharp increase in the hardware resources required to run Vista; the fact that many organizations are maintaining longer hardware refresh cycles where they support PCs for more than five years; and a lack of easy access to the PC inventory information needed to implement an effective life cycle management process.
"Most organizations planning to deploy Vista within the next two years will have a PC life cycle that is affected by these factors, which, taken together, present a significant operational and financial stumbling block if not planned for well ahead of time," he said.
Preliminary user surveys suggest that 27 percent of organizations are planning to wait one to two years before undertaking a Vista rollout, with some 33 percent planning to wait between six months and one year, he said.
For its part, research group Gartner estimates that Vista will be running on less than 10 percent of PCs in the installed base by the end of 2007, rising to 29.3 percent in 2008, 50 percent in 2009 and 67.7 percent by the end of 2010.
Gartner analysts Michael Silver and David Smith are also advising companies that they should expect to spend 18 months testing, planning and piloting before undergoing large-scale mainstream deployment.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told me in a recent interview that he disagrees with that timeframe and that it should not take companies that long before they deploy Vista, but he did acknowledge that "I work at Microsoft and I know what we have done. I know that this is the highest quality, most reliable stuff we have ever done so, of course, I'm going to have a particular view."
Brad Goldberg, the general manager for the Windows client business group, is also far more bullish. He told me earlier this year that Microsoft expects 10 times more seats of Windows Vista to be deployed at launch, with deployment within the first year being twice as quick as that for any other version, and business customers deploying it faster than for any other Windows operating system release.
A number of enterprises I have spoken to, including TUV Nord Group, one of Germany's largest technical service providers, and the U.S. Army's Advanced Technologies directorate, are in no rush to upgrade.
So who's right? What are your corporate upgrade plans? I'd like to hear.
Comments (9)
Hi Peter,
I am an IT Manager at a 200 XP client Non-Profit in Hamilton Ontario. I have been testing Vista in one form or another since Beta 2. While I find the security enhancements, integrated search, and enhanced Group Policy options useful, I will not rush to deploy Vista. I will continue to test and deploy a small number of pc's for testing purposes over the next 3 months. I will not be doing any in-place upgrades. Vista installations will dribble out as we refresh our hardware. I do not have an issue running XP and Vista through-out our organization for a while.
Mark Galli
Posted by Mark Galli | December 5, 2006 9:03 PM
Planning: Penny Wise and Pound Foolish. Many companies bottom feed from the configuration pool for the immediate economic hit. This results in the inability to respond in any effective way (other than traumatic fork-lift upgrades) in order to accomodate periodic OS & S/W upgrades. Capacity planning is not limited to servers......
Posted by Lloyd Loisel | December 6, 2006 9:57 AM
I work in a small IT Dept supporting about 250 users. We've forbidden upgrading to Vista, Office 2007 and IE7 for the present time. We have too much 3rd party software with compatibility issues. For some of this software, vendor support is dependent on running on vendor certified versions of the OS.
A point many people seem to forget is that 3rd party software providers need to understand and have the tools to make any required changes for their respective software packages to be MS OS conformant.
Take Office 2007 for example. The OpenXML spec submitted to ECMA has been undergoing last minute changes and has only recently be "finalized". This means that the Office software which writes documents in the OpenXML format is already out of nate and in need of a refresh. And any last minute changes which were included before the release went gold are essentially untested.
Any vendor 3rd party package depending on this new functionality is likely either to arrive broken or get broken later. Who wants to take chances like that?
I don't expect our enterprise required 3rd party software to be Vista conformant until 2008 at the earliest. Given past history, I suspect 2009 is more the likely target date.
Posted by No Telln | December 6, 2006 2:22 PM
I support about 150 users and have no plans on going to vista in the next couple of years. We did the same thing with XP. I used it for a year before we rolled it out. About 75% of our machines will run it without a problem right now. I have a beta version and am also worried about some software not being supported. Besides that, I just don't see a need to upgrade. The eye candy is nice but not worth it. We usually consider it a release candidate after they get the first service pack out. Not before. The whole anti piracy bend over and take it thing is really getting out of hand. I hope that by the time we decide to go to it they have all of the bugs worked out. I would rather go the way of an alternative OS if I had a choice but the software that is used here is very dependent on windows and there is not a suitable replacement yet for any other os.....YET
Posted by More help | December 6, 2006 3:55 PM
I support about 50 desktops in house and around 3500 on customer's sites. There are no plans to deploy Vista for at least two-three years. We are in the final stages of rolling out XP and the third party apps that our business depends upon are not Vista compatible. The software vendor we represent has no given timetable to supply new versions. The last time I contacted the developer, I was told they wouldn't begin testing for Vista until sometime aound the end of Q1 2007. It took them over a year to fix glitches with XP. There is no reason to expect anything faster this cycle. Around 20% of our client base is still running Win9x, 50% are on Win2k and the rest on XP with a scattering of NT boxes. I actually replaced a Win 3.11 box last month.
We are in health care, a vertical market that tends to run a single app per desktop. Around 60% of our client's desktops don't have Office installed, just practice specific medical software. The entire day is spent in one specialized app and maybe a web browser. So hardware requirements have historically been low. Our site is in better shape hardware speaking but most of our customer's sites are far below Vista minimums. It's really hard to justify to customers why they should consider replacing functioning PC's that are running the current necessary apps just to line Microsoft's coffers.
Posted by Not Yet | December 6, 2006 5:53 PM
I believe that the whole spike in system requirements is so that Microsoft has an easier time taking control of everyone's computers since recent computers are built with TPM chips, which is essentially an OS-supported hardware backdoor... If anything the threat presented by Treacherous Computing and Digital Restrictions Management is the reason you shouldn't adopt Vista.
Posted by Kefkachu | December 7, 2006 11:30 AM
Can you tell me how many % do not meet the requirements of Vista Business ?
I would get my facts right before making observations and deductions. There is a difference between Vista Business and Vista Premium! Businesses do not need to run the bells and whistles of Vista Premium and that is why Vista Business is a different edition!
Posted by Kandarp | December 7, 2006 12:45 PM
Let's see. This is touted as the most bug-free, secure version of Windows, addressing virtually all the shortcomings of previous versions.
I think I've heard that about every new version of Windows since 3.1. Experience tells us that such enormous programs as operating systems cannot be delivered without bugs, as complete and thorough testing would be interrupted by the heat-death of the universe.
Microsoft is acting in such a blatant, self- serving manner one would think they have a near monopoly on desktop operating systems - oh, wait, they do, don't they?
Fool me once, shame on me; foot me twice, shame on you.
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