Survey Says Vista Not Cracking the Enterprise
OK, we know. It's right up there with the news that the earth is round and
the shocker that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Still, if you
were curious, a new survey "reveals" that half of all IT managers
have
no plans
to deploy Vista.
Well, they have no plans to deploy Vista "at this time," according
to the survey. Don't let that bit on the end slip away. What happens when a
company undergoes a hardware refresh and can't get anything but Vista for new
machines? As we've suggested
before in RCP, that's when Vista might finally make a break for enterprise
pay dirt.
Or, if this survey is any indication, a hardware refresh might be the moment
when mundane office workers in drab cubicles (hey, that description sounds familiar)
might suddenly become hipsters with Apple logos on their machines. Does that
mean that we'll also have to listen to obscure pop bands and stop watching big-budget
movies in favor of indie "films"? The cultural ramifications could
be massive. To the copy and paste from the RCPmag.com
story:
"The survey asked participants if they had 'considered the possibility
of deploying any non-Windows operating system as an alternative to adopting
Windows Vista.' It turned out that 44 percent of participants said that they
were indeed considering a non-Windows alternative....The Windows OS replacement
that respondents mentioned most was Macintosh (28 percent), followed by Red
Hat Linux (23 percent), SuSE Linux (18 percent), Ubuntu (18 percent), other
Linux (nine percent) and not sure (four percent)."
Somewhere, Steve Jobs is laughing with delight. OK, so maybe there's some wishful
thinking going on here in IT world -- it seems unlikely that companies would
jettison major investments in Microsoft simply out of disdain for Vista -- but
the survey numbers, for what they're worth, confirm that Vista still looks like
a dud in the enterprise. If it does ever make a serious dent there -- and we
still suspect that it will -- it'll be more because IT folks have little choice
but to deploy it than because they actually like it.
A Mac in every cubicle? Really? Share your vision of this brave new world at
[email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on February 20, 2008