Si, have you actually worked in business, at all? IT professionals may well make recommendations regarding the direction of IT within a company, but they do not decide whether they go ahead or not. The business does. Any decision like that in any business has to be driven by business benefits, and clear well defined cost savings – whether direct or indirect (eg, cost of supporting a unified client operating system / better security, or power savings).

i think the problem here is that people are making comments when they clearly do not understand exactly how IT support and implementation works within a real world business. Practically every IT department that has considered the deployment of vista will have considered many or all of the factors involved, and most departments recognise that vista is a huge change over windows xp/2000 or even me/98. This does not mean the operating system is wrong, or the things it does are wrong or bad. Think of it in the same way as moving a windows user to mac os would initially decrease his productivity. The user experience is different, but there are good reasons to make the change. Not only is the user experience different in vista, but the hardware requirements for the full vista experience is higher than in windows xp too, the deployment tools are different, management is different, patching and app deployment are different, but it’s all good. All very very good in fact, expecially considering the deployment tools which are a paradigm change.

james said “Because it’s self-fulfilling. They create job security out of IT insecurity.”

i don’t know about your IT department, but the last place i worked had a very very secure IT infrastructure – i put it in myself. Is that job security? I doubt it.. it’s called doing the job right. If only the same mantra was used across the rest of the business sector.

si also said “IT manager’s CV says “Oversaw a Vista Rollout with 50 staff under me”, it will look a lot better than “Managed an XP system with 10 staff under me”.”

hrmm. i’m not sure how that mentality works. the deployment tools which are shipping for vista (which can be used for XP now, actually) require far less staff and intelligence levels to get working. Secondly, most IT departments do not hire 50 staff to roll out a new operating system because the skillset to do it is already in house.

nick said, “Microsoft is a hardware vendor! Don’t believe me?”

well, no. i don’t believe you. Apple is a hardware vendor, they make, design, sell, and support computer hardware. Microsoft do not. To make an operating system product which does not work well is not in their interest. Granted though, they could have done a better job with earlier versions. Having said that, vista scales well over lots of different kind of hardware config – yes, you may lose some eye candy, but the same is said of osx on older hardware too.

I think to compare vista a 2007 OS against osx a 2000 os (with service packs), in relation to user expectation, and say that apple comes out a winner is a bit of a stupid thing to do. you’re not comparing them on a level playing field. osx comes with plenty of bloat and useless rubbish that makes it every bit as clunky as vista betas. I suggest, nick, you try an rtm of vista, you might actually be surprised.

“…maybe MS is trying to be honest…”

Why start now, when deceit, FUD and vaporware have work so well for them? That would be a 180 degree change in company policy!

And yes, I am a “former” IT person who slide over to the Mac and is why we created macCompanion magazine.

http://www.maccompanion.com

Just my 2cents :)