Now more than a year out of the business gate, Microsoft's Vista operating system is having trouble making friends in the exact place it needs them the most—the IT department.
When asked, rather than express excitement over Vista's promised better security, networking features and fancy GUI, IT professionals admit trepidation over the looming upgrade and the trouble it will cause.
"Personally, I'm dreading the amount of time it'll take to upgrade each machine from a hardware standpoint—adding memory or whatever—and from an operating system upgrade. It's just time consuming," Howard Graylin, a senior technical analyst in Ridgeland, Miss., told eWEEK.
But technology professionals worry about more than the time it will take to actually migrate, but the inevitable difficulties resulting from an, at times, painfully slow user learning curve.
"I also dread the 'why doesn't it work like this anymore?' questions we'll get from users. My standard answer is, 'I don't know. Let me ask Bill [Gates] the next time we have lunch and I'll get back to you.' Well, the second sentence is said silently," jokes Graylin. "I need to keep my job."
Graylin's fears are echoed in a study to be released Nov. 19 in which 90 percent of IT professionals reported that they had concerns about migrating to Vista.
"One thing that we've heard a lot is that there is a big training impact. The shift from Windows 98 to 2000 and then to XP were smoother because the interfaces were more similar," Rob Meinhardt, CEO of KACE, a provider of systems management appliances which commissioned King Research to perform the study.
Read the full article at eWEEK.
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