For some time there has been an attitude that businesses must move to the latest Microsoft OS, no matter what. However, evidence exists that this does not permeate throughout the business world. Consider that despite Windows 98 having been officially killed off some years ago it is still found in many offices. Windows 2000 and XP are still supported and seem popular.

Consider a small business. They do not have money to spend on unnecessary equipment, and the owner will ask themselves one simple question: Do I need to upgrade? If the system they currently use is reliable and does what they need, the answer is likely to be no. Why spend thousands of pounds and many hours changing to a new OS when it will not provide any noticeable improvement over the existing one?

Vista does tend to shoot itself in the foot in this respect. While it may be pretty, it is not noticeably faster than older OS and can in many case be slower. In a recent, albeit rather unscientific test, an old Sony Pentium 3 laptop running Windows 2000 with 256MB of RAM was faster to boot than a brand new Dell with far more processing power, gigabytes of RAM, and Vista. The Dell was comfortably above the recommended standard for Vista and yet it was still beaten in what for most users is a crucial test: How long does it take from pressing the button until I can start typing my report?

In terms of day to day use, Vista is not an improvement over XP. That's before you consider things like the DRM measures that J. Edgar Hoover would have considered excessively invasive. XP will still run all the common programs, handle email and Internet access, all the things that an average business needs. It is also a substantial expense to buy, install, and train your employees to use.

It can be hoped that Vista will provoke many businesses to switch to open-source software such as Linux. Once your tech support staff are trained in the use of Linux then your upgrade costs plummet, as it is perfectly legal for them to assemble their own version using freely downloadable components. Equally, if you choose to buy in a Linux distribution there is nothing to stop you from upgrading components as and when you need to. Security can be far tighter than any Microsoft OS, and patches for software bugs tend to appear more quickly due to the collaborative nature of Linux development. For a manager brave enough to listen to their tech support people and ignore the herd mentality that sees millions of dollars flowing to Microsoft there could be large rewards in the form of lower operating costs.

In summary, I feel that the only way in which most businesses will finally move to Vista is when they are forced to do so. In the small business case above, this may come when their old PCs expire due to hardware failure and they are unable to get spares. For larger businesses, it will probably come when support for XP is finally switched off. Note that this switchoff will not disable existing copies of XP, it merely means that there will be no more updates. Add to this the pressures on Microsoft dominance by open source software. Even if you buy a fully assembled off the shelf distribution it is still cheaper than Vista in terms of bang per buck. For the end user little retraining will be needed. For these reasons, I suspect that many businesses will throw in their lot with the cuddly Linux penguins when their XP updates are finally squelched.

Learn more about this author, Matt Gadfield.
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