Is Anyone, On A Large Corporate Scale, planning on moving to Vista?

My company has numerous clients throughout the Continental US and Canada. During our Friday staff meeting my boss told us that we had polled all of our clients to see if any of them were planning on moving to Vista, as a corporation.

The results were that most of their IT departments weren't even looking at Vista, and for the few departments that were, none were planning on moving off of Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 anytime in the near future.

We apparantely took this poll to determine if we needed to get Vista into our labs and start developing versions of our products that would be compatible with that platform.

Because of the results of that poll, my company is shelving any plans they had of even bringing Vista in the door to evaluate at this time.

My questions to all of you commerical and corporate developers are:

1. As a corporation, are you planning on moving, across the board, to Vista?
2. If so, upon what was the decision to move made?
3. Do you have any clients that are planning to move to Vista which would necessite creating new versions of your existing products?

(PS: Our target market are large, multi-/million/billion dollar Insurance Companies and we specialist in Risk Management and Healthcare reimbursment software)

Companies are typically very conservative especially when they have the inertia of a large number of business critical applications to test and certify so I'd be very suprised if any company wanted to be an early adopter.

However Vista offers a large number of very compelling reasons for business users to switch and as these become more well known I would not be suprised to see a large second wave of adopters in 6-12 months time.

You should Vista check your applications anyway because it is easier to sell them to people who may have no current plans whatsoever to upgrade if they are comfortable that should an upgrade happen your app. will still be there for them...what is more the things that would fail a Vista check are usually things that no business app should be doing anyway.

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Originally Posted by Merrion

You should Vista check your applications anyway because it is easier to sell them to people who may have no current plans whatsoever to upgrade if they are comfortable that should an upgrade happen your app. will still be there for them...

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That is, and was, my feeling as well, and this was shared by a few of the other developers. The problem we are having is convincing senior management that it is worth the time and expense to bring Vista in on a test platform for what they consider to "a possibility".

In fact, so conservative are most of our customers that many are still buying, and requesting updates/upgrades to our VB6 products. The .NET versions of our products have only begun to actually sell, on a fairly small scale, within the last 12 months. This addes to our senior managements position that we do not need to concern ourselves with Vista at this time.

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Originally Posted by Merrion

what is more the things that would fail a Vista check are usually things that no business app should be doing anyway.

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This is a theme that I have read in several white papers on Vista. Given the detail to which our products rigidly follow existing business rules, it is comforting to know that in all likelyhood, when we do get the "Go" to bring in Vista (whenever that might be :sick: ), we should not face any large problems with porting our applications.

I work in the Financials Division of my company. We have a huge Defense division that makes software products for the military. Word from that side of the house mirrors what our customers have told us, i.e., the military is not planning on going to Vista anytime soon either.

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Originally Posted by Hack

1. As a corporation, are you planning on moving, across the board, to Vista?

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Even though we are not software house we are large enough to understand the impact of such move - as I said previously we still remember impact from Win 3.1 to Win95 move wich was a disaster for many companies. We don't want that to happen again. So, that's the bottom line I guess.
Besides, the cost of such upgrade is another major factor.
However, we will get a few copies for developers and network engineers just to see what's involved ...

I asked one of my larger customers - 1000+ PC in two dozen buildings...

They were more concerned about hardware costs - barely 50% of the PC's meet minimum requirements - translating into hardware $$'s. But they still felt that within a year a VISTA migration plan will be in the works.

I'm more happy that they are my first customer to consider a 64bit SQL 2005 box! I can't wait for that (sorry to be off topic)...

Another thing to bear in mind is that the advertising program for Windows Vista is going to be absolutely huge and much of that will be in the non-IT press so Vista awareness is going to ramp up very sharply.

I recommended my company to atleast get one copy of vista to see how our programs perform.
The answer was -- NO WAY. We are not going for the useless Vista until it becomes a bit popular.


Pradeep :)

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Originally Posted by szlamany

...I'm more happy that they are my first customer to consider a 64bit SQL 2005 box! I can't wait for that (sorry to be off topic)...

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Too much excitement ... unlike Oracle which requires client installed on evry workstation SQL Server is only one machine so what's the big deal?

Web applications mostly. No Vista fears.


You need to install SQL Client tools on every developer machine as well.

I have a client that is going to be upgrading their systems to Vista within the first 6 months of this year. But in defense, they are a college and have a deal with Microsoft, like many other colleges, where they get a discount on MS software if they run the latest software on their systems. This includes all their servers, workstations, students workstations, and public access stations.

I can get more info this upcoming week as I have a software installation project in two departments that should take 1-2 weeks.

i'll try it soon, after all its not that expensive..then at least i'll have a pc fast enough for .net and sql server :D

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Originally Posted by szlamany

They were more concerned about hardware costs - barely 50% of the PC's meet minimum requirements -

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From what has been gathered from our customer base, this seems to be the overwhelming issue in not moving to Vista.

Many of our customers just upgraded to XP Pro for their desktops, and the only reason they did that was because it didn't require any significant hardware replacement costs.

This is also the reason that my upper management has nixed bringing Vista in to evaluate. None of our lab PCs or our developer machines could run it. They would all have to be replaced.

Hack, maybe they should read this ...
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...s/default.mspx

Upgrade Advisor:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...r/default.mspx

XP based, Vista ready system:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...y/capable.mspx

Thanks for the links Rob.

I would never, of course, presume to contact senior management on my own. I'm just a lowely developer, but I will pass them along to my boss to pass up the chain. :D

My experience with my company is that our technology changes are based solely on that of our clients. We have a client base that is pretty conservative. As I've mentioned, our VB6 versions are still selling well and we continue to receive requests for enhancements to those. The .NET stuff is just, now, starting to move. The only reason the .NET was even brought in the door was because one of our clients happen to ask if we were going to be developing .NET versions of our products.

My company is not one of those that will go out an invest in new technology simply because said technology exists. If our clients are not asking for it, then we are not doing it, regardless of what is available.

I'm guessing this philosophy is not exclusive to the company I work for.

The thing with Vista and .NET is that Vista comes with all four versions of the framework already installed by default. So deployment of a standard app theoretically only need the exe and no downloading of any framework.

I think this is going to be a big selling point. Containing all of the dependency files for the various versions of VB is something I always thought Microsoft should have done with all of its prior desktop Operating Systems.

We aren't even planning to decide whether to move to Vista yet. We're looking at 2009 to 2010 to look into whether we have to see if there's any reason to spend time talking about it. IOW, Vista? Wazzat?

I know this is a bit of an old thread, but what I have been reading is that the programs written for .NET running don't really have issues, but the biggest thing is installing applications that run unmanaged code and/or are installed with programs other than Windows Installer. I haven't seen too many applications that are 100% managed, many still use unmanaged drivers or other components.

My program is targeted at public schools, and they are not going to be fast to move to Vista either. Mostly because the budget of upgrading the computers, though I haven't done any real queries.

Some schools/districts have grant money for computers/upgrades. Also, some districts/schools have agreements with MS to stay updated with the latest software for discounts.

Yeah, the bigger districts do, but my target market is smaller school districts and schools that don't have the budget for the very expensive teacher evaluation software, but don't want to do it in word or excel.

In fact, I have to make sure that my software is Windows 98 compatible, or I would lose a significant amount of clients.

We're fortunate that we drive our technology, not our clients.... if that were the case, we'd still be running our app as the Access App that it was when I started with the company 10 years ago. Also, the types of places we are going into are upgrading from Excel sheets to our app to run everything, so they are looking to us to tell them what will be needed. And at some point, that may include machines capable of running Vista.... meanwhile we've got some dev machines already loaded with Vista, and have made some changes so that our app will run in Vista w/o issues. This means we can now support Win 2000/2003/Vista with out any issues.

-tg

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Originally Posted by techgnome

We're fortunate that we drive our technology, not our clients....

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Yes, you are, and also you are the exception not the rule, you lucky gnome! :)

But a good consultant will drive his client down the path that is best for them. Eventually it will be best for them and to prepare will be the only solution for now.

You can not drive a client that does not wish to be driven. In so far as they are the ones signing the checks, they are the ones that own the car, choose the road and determine the direction.

I think there is a senario that isn't being discussed here. Most companies will not do a large scale rollout of Vista, however, as new machines default to having Vista installed, they will begin to get Vista in house. This means that they are likely to want your applications to run on both the old systems and the new Vista systems. As history shows, it his almost certain that Vista will become the primary operating system with Microsoft pushing it. To not plan to have your applications working with it -- in addition to current operating systems in use -- is to discount the future.

As stated earlier, at a minimum, testing for compatability and determing what will need to be changed is the minimum I would recommend anyone doing software development on products do. Otherwise, the first time someone says, we need a Vista version, you might get caught in a corner.

Brad!
Alan Simpson's Windows Vista Bible - Desktop Edition

Most of the large scale operations I deal with have multi-person help-desks.

Use all kinds of scripting logic to push out installs and updates...

Usually have pre-prepared OS images that they load onto new/repaired machines...

Have tech staff at buildings supporting the machines/apps/OS...

It's not as easy for them to simply flip the VISTA switch. Granted when they all agree as a group to fashion a migration plan this whole picture will need to be brought into light. That's hardware costs, support staff training, testing of large app's and all those mini-app's they have. Touch-screens for school cafeteria users, hand-helds for security staff, drivers for barcode, printers, and a whole variety of less common hardware.

When you consider all the new software coming from MS right now - EXCHANGE 2007, new OFFICE products - VISTA - it's truly a major undertaking.

Then there is the time required - most of my customers are school districts - so they have that summer two month period (where everyone else is relaxing) to bite the bullet and attempt the rollout.

Having some machine with one OS and some with another OS in a large environment is cumbersome when all these points are taken into consideration.

This certainly doesn't mean that we won't have a VISTA box in our office for testing our apps in advance. We intentionally keep our UI client code simple so that OS changes don't cripple us - but the effects of a major OS are never fully known until the testing occurs.

But the world is not just one way or the other. Some companies are like you guys are saying, too large and push out deployments all at once. Others are open minded and will prepare for the future by testing a few systems and preparing for the necessary changes in order to one day do a deployment.

If you present an informed presentation most clients will agree that they need to prepare and showing them that is what a good consultant / developer will do. You dont want them coming back at you saying "How come you didnt tell us about Vista?".

All of our client companies are HUGE and have a pretty extensive IT department. I suspect they already know about Vista.

However Rob, you make good, valid, points if your client base is fairly small and doesn't have much of an IT department.

Brad, and others, have also made good points, and I'm doing my best to convince my individual "powers that be" that bringing in Vista and setting it up on a test platform and benchmarking what we already have is a good idea.