Corporate Deployment of Vista Not Happening Right Away

A bunch of stories have been circulating around the web about how various branches of the US Government are banning Microsoft Vista. Well, it ain’t exactly so, and in fact, there was a very intelligent clarification recently on either the TWIT or CrankyGeeks podcasts (can’t remember which).

The reality is that big corporations and governments do not want to be on the “bleeding edge” of operating system deployment. This is so much more critical with Vista, which carries some excessively heavy systems resource baggage. My own employer, who manages tens of thousands of Windows boxes, has put off Vista deployment for at least a year, maybe longer. Reason? Virtually every PC in use today isn’t powerful enough to run Vista (and will have to be replaced), or it doesn’t have enough RAM, it doesn’t have enough disk space, the peripheral cards are older and Vista drivers are either “coming soon” or never coming. Moreover, much of the software they are using is not compatible.

You see, big corporations and governments usually buy the very cheapest computers they possibly can, that will permit their employees to do their job efficiently with cost-effectiveness. They also work on a 24-36 month acquisition cycle, where new computers are either leased for a set time period, or purchased. Every 24-36 months, depending upon lease terms or corporate policy, or both, these machines are replaced (known euphemistically as a technology refresh). Fortunately, even a base-model corporate laptop (D620) from Dell these days includes 1 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and a 1.66 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, so it isn’t as tortuous as you might think. Those will run Vista with reasonable performance.

In my own organization, virtually every piece of software we regularly use is not compatible or is only partially-compatible with Vista, starting with Adobe Creative Suite CS2, Adobe FrameMaker, an older version of FileMaker Pro we are still using, and I’m sure many more. I need to check with our font creation software vendor to see if the dongle they saddled us with will work in Vista…

Suffice it to say, this is going to be a painfully expensive upgrade for everyone. I think it could probably be compared to making a platform switch, such as my office did in 1998, when we were forced to migrate our Macs to Windows NT (I have permanent tear stains over that one…). It required hardware and all new software (in some cases, the software vendors were nice enough to give us a “cross-grade” license).

Every corporate user or anyone who has volume user agreements with Microsoft will ultimately have to upgrade. It’s in the contract. I think they usually give contract holders 18 months to upgrade, but in order to maintain the volume license agreements, upgrade they must. That and every new machine being purchased today comes with Vista, although, as David Cohen also states below, most corporate and government entities erase the drives and reinstall their tried and true image files of Windows XP Pro (the image files include all the standard applications like Microsoft Office, so they don’t have to install those individually).

In a large corporation (or government entity) that uses Active Directory and Group Policies to control what users can and cannot do with their PCs, they will have to be reviewed, line by line, function by function, and usually completely rewritten, before they can deploy Vista.

On top of the above AD and GP changes, the learning curve for the IT folks is going to be very steep. They are going to have to identify what the minimum level of hardware is acceptable, what software needs to be upgraded, and for many IT professionals, it’s going to mean more expensive schooling to upgrade their Microsoft certifications (my own MCSE is tied to Windows 2000, so I’m a dinosaur in that area, too). Migrating to Vista is a big, big thing. Put on your Boy Scout hats and be prepared!

Finally, anyone who has had to deal with installing and deploying a new version of a Microsoft OS knows to NEVER be the first one to do so. The real professionals always wait until the first service pack (a collection of bug fixes and enhancements) is distributed–usually six to nine months after the initial release.

Not wanting to take all the credit/blame for this discussion, MyMac.com’s own David Cohen had this to say:

It (“banning” deployment of new OS’s–LG) HAS happened with every version of Windows since 98.

Microsoft changes a lot with each release, that breaks drivers. So many companies or organisations will wait until updated drivers are issued. The they need to check that their critical apps work – not the off-the-shelf stuff like Office, but the in-house developed apps, and any enterprise apps. There’s also infrastructure changes on the network and servers to consider, too.

By the time that has been sorted out (six months at least), the first bug reports are well established. Many will wait for the first Service Pack, and then go through another round of testing.

On top of that, a desktop rollout to multiple machines while retaining client data is a costly and resource intensive effort, that takes careful planning and budget allocation to deliver successfully.

This is a standard and sensible approach – IT departments should not be suckered by the eye candy and keynote features. I know – I have worked in the enterprise IT industry for fifteen years, and I’ve been through this with every release since Windows 3.1

The Mac bloggers who pounce on this story just show their lack of corporate IT experience. With the Mac, it is simpler to move to the next OS because you do it yourself on your own machines. You generally don’t have to support a group of non-IT interested users who just want to use the computer to get their job done.

IT bods just want to stop the geeks in the workforce getting carried away and installing an OS that will cause them more work.

And the kicker to this is – Microsoft does not give a stuff about organisations not jumping in on day one. They are selling a Vista licence with EVERY PC sold at the moment – so their revenue stream is solid. They don’t care if any department in Government puts off the migration – they will sell Vista licenses when those departments replace their machines, even if the machines are instantly formatted back to XP.