Mailbag: Enterprise Adoption Takes Time, More
Marc shares his own take on Vista's dismal enterprise adoption rates, and what that might mean for future OSes:
About as many in the enterprise adopted Windows 2000 before XP came out as will have adopted Vista by the time that Windows 7 ships. And enterprise adoption always lags well behind consumer adoption. The reasons? First, many enterprise-owned programs were developed in-house, while many others are industry-specific and might be costly to upgrade. It can take months to thoroughly test and upgrade all these applications under the new operating system.
Second, most enterprise customers replace hardware based on three- to five-year lifecycles. Operating system upgrades tend not to happen until at least half of the company workstations have been replaced with new hardware. The fact that service packs are released every 18 months or so may simply be coincidental.
-Marc
Last week, Doug described himself as "more of an old sow than a young buck," prompting one reader to make a very significant correction:
You might want to know that a sow is "an adult female swine." I guess I might as well get used to such city-slicker-style errors as we now have a whole generation of kids who've watched "Barnyard" the movie (which is now a TV servies) where the cows walk upright and both the male and female bovines have udders.
You do know that only female cows have udders?
-Anonymous
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 30, 2009