Sydney Water skipping Vista

Sydney Water CIO Tim Catley today said the organization, Australia's largest water utility, would likely skip Vista and instead plan ahead to install Windows 7 on its 4,000 desktops, which are currently running Windows XP.

Catley, who since 2005 has worked to turn around Sydney Water's IT operations, said he would likely skip Vista because the threat of Microsoft putting the screws on hardware vendors to end support for XP had dissipated.

"I think we might skip Vista and wait for 7 to come along," Catley told ZDNet.com.au after delivering a speech at Gartner's 2008 Symposium ITExpo at the Sydney Convention Centre.

"I don't think the threat of hardware vendors pulling support for (XP) is going to eventuate--because now that they've announced (Windows) 7 the heat will go out of it," he said.

Catley's comments echoed industry opinion on Vista revealed in a recent survey showing that most businesses were happy to stay with XP and wait for Windows 7, which was revealed to Microsoft developers last month.

Locally, few businesses have upgraded to Vista. While Microsoft has found a home for the unloved operating system at Australian Customs Service, few others have chosen to migrate to Vista.

Catley's view stands in direct contrast to CEO of the company that has provided Sydney Water's managed desktop service since 2006, Dell. Michael Dell last year predicted 2009 would be the year for Vista.

Liam Tung of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

[Penguinisto]

Heh - this isn't even news anymore :)

I do have some questions, though:

* What will happen when the big corps who are skipping Vista realize that Windows 7 will be equally unable to run their respective plethora of custom apps?

* What will they do when they realize that they'll still have to pretty much buy new desktops all around just to run the thing?

* It's still going to cost a ton of money, time, and headaches to implement it, and if the economy doesn't pick up by the time Windows 7 is released and the budgets are still tight - then what?

* With XP approaching EOL (2010?), is MSFT going to automatically extend the EOL date when/if industry balks at using Vista or Windows 7, or what?

I know that getting honest answers to these questions will be nearly impossible (cue the blinkered MSFT fanboy choir and their repetitive ad hominem hymns), but these are questions that the enterprise will be asking as well... the sooner someone at MSFT can answer them satisfactorily, the sooner they have a chance at not facing a huge loss of marketshare.

[thenet411]

Those of us who have been around long enough to have worked with DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 9x (or NT), Windows 2K, XP, and Vista know that the questions above are questions we asked ourselves during every major transition. Especially going from Win3.11 to Win95. Then from the 9x systems to 2K (or even skipping 2K and jumping to XP). Eventually these things work out. There is rarely ever a need to move an entire company to a new OS at once. You move those you can as applications catch up to the new OS way of doing things and you leave the die hards on old systems and keep supporting them. EOL does NOT mean EOU (End of Usefullness).

[Penguinisto]

That's the problem - this go 'round, there isn't a smoothly-working internal compatibility engine and backwards hardware compatibility to help things along, as there was in everything up to XP and 2k3 Server...

/P

[tobart]

I have a question. Why isn't a corporation with 4,000 desktops running Windows Server? Would that not be cheaper or at least more manageable? Then they'd only have to worry about moving from server 2003 to 2008, and everyone knows there's little real reason to do that.

[eBob1]

Because Windows Server is a Server operating system, not a desktop operating system. It is significantly more expensive than a desktop operating system. I would guess that they might be running Windows Server on their servers, but we are talking about desktops here.