Reading blogs at the same time as actually being an IT person has been sort of like living a double life for the last few months.  On the blog end, you'd think Vista was finally catching on.  Every day there's a new Vista study or survey showing how its making inroads into the corporate market. 

But in my real life, no one has deployed Vista.  Not only that, everyone I know is actively pursuing ways to avoid deployment of Vista altogether.  Making plans instead to skip it entirely and hope for the best from Windows 7 (or in rare cases considering a large scale Mac deployment)

So I felt more than a little vindicated reading the new Forrester study (via Computerworld) that says...

Fewer than one in 11 of the PCs being used in large or very large enterprises runs Windows Vista, according to survey results released Wednesday by Forrester Research Inc.

Of the 50,000 enterprise users surveyed by the Cambridge, Mass., analyst firm, 87.1% were still running Windows XP at the end of June, compared to 8.8% for Vista. According to author Thomas Mendel, that implies that the majority of PCs upgraded to Vista were those running older versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 or 98.

Exactly! 

The reality of Vista is that it would be almost irresponsible to deploy it at this point.  Though technically there are a few improvements I've found that there is no case that can be made for upgrading to Vista in a corporate environment.  There's simply no way to justify the cost of software, deployment, and retraining based on how little it offers.

Let's look at the supposedly compelling reasons to upgrade

Bitlocker: Bitlocker, which encrypts a user's hard drive, is nice but it's technology that falls into that gray area between theoretically useful and actually useful.  If you've ever asked yourself why all these Government or Financial laptops that get stolen aren't encrypted the reason is because any info that's valuable is too valuable to risk losing just because someone lost their password. So if those industries aren't willing to encrypt their entire hard drives what chance does Microsoft have of convincing anyone else? 

Enhanced Network Stack: Big Whoop!  When's the last time you  heard someone complaining about the inefficiencies of their network stack?

Sleep Mode that Actually Works: This I'll give it.  This might be the only real improvement from Vista to XP (though its more bug fix than actual improvement)

New GPO (Group Policy Objects): These basically allow you to customize more settings across groups of users but having looked at the list I didn't see anything that I either hadn't already done or couldn't do using VBScript.  So the question is, if I already have scripts to do the same tasks how much does Microsoft integrating those functions into the OS really do for me?

Direct X 10: Doesn't do anyone any good.  No software developer in their right mind is developing exclusively for Vista so having a version of DirectX that's exclusive just guarantees those features won't be used.

Image Based Install: Microsoft finally integrated a decent image based install system which makes installing the thing faster.  But everyone is already using a third party program to make disk images for their PCs so I don't see what IT professional this is going to appeal to.  Too little, too late on Microsoft's part.

Now lets look at the negatives

  • The most compelling features are also available for XP (WPF, Windows Search, etc...)
  • It's slow on everything but the very fastest PCs
  • It still has compatibility problems (most of our software from custom vendors still doesn't work with it)
  • They changed the UI just enough to be confusing
  • Security is so obnoxious (with its constant pestering) that you are forced to let users turn it off
  • The new driver model means your devices might not be supported or the new driver might still be unstable (Nvidia in particular has had a lot of problems with this)
  • It's more expensive than XP was
  • It has an even more limited license than XP (in Particular, you can only transfer it once as opposed to XP which allowed for three times)
  • Built in DRM (I don't see this as a big issue but I have to give a shout out to the Freetards)
  • Many versions have been stripped of features that were standard before.  The so called Premium version for example was stripped of Remote Desktop.

So what have we learned

Basically that Vista isn't worth it.  There are no advantages to point to, plenty of disadvantages and the cost to deploy it (according to my calculations) was around $197 per system.  So the question becomes: Why on earth would any company deploy it?

I honestly don't have an answer to that question