Switching to [Vista|Vs2k5|New Things]

This morning on Slashdot they have a story about CIOs’ First Impressions about Vista. Similar to other stories, they focus on how long companies are waiting to roll out Vista.

The problem is that this isn’t unique to Vista – or Microsoft. I’ve worked for companies doing Java, Ruby, ColdFusion, ASP and .NET. We’ve had Windows, Unix, Linux and other systems in the front and back end. Every time a new version came out of just about anything (CF5/6/MX, .NET 2.0/3.0, Eclipse, VS 2k5, Java 5, etc) the devs in the company were desperate to start running it. Even with operating systems – I was in a shop when Windows 2k came out, and we wanted nothing more than to upgrade to it. But, especially in the larger companies, we had policies, and committees, and indeed entire departments devoted to “evaluating” and developing a “deployment schedule”. Guess what – any time you see those phrases together, you can count on a year deployment.

In other words, the spin that companies are deploying Vista simply because it is Microsoft is a bit of a farce. All the arguments that people are happy running NT 4.0 can easily be countered with many people still running the 2.2 kernel. People don’t like change, and that’s something that can be universally, company-agnostically applied.

And to those with comments like “your [sic] an employee at Microsoft and you haven’t had a chance to use it yourself?” I can assure you that they push us hard, and provide a lot of the resources necessary, to become familiar with the software. I’m running Vista on my laptop, and so far I like it – even though I didn’t think I would. In fact, the local offices have been setting up install-fests, just like we used to have with some of the LUGs I’ve been part of, to help people get upgraded.