DOT bans Vista, Office 2007, IE 7 upgrades

[joepic]

The U.S. Department of Transportation has quietly put the kibosh on Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), banning upgrades to those Microsoft Corp. products -- at least for now.

Donna Seymour, CIO of the DOT's Maritime Administration (MARAD), said a July move of the agency's Washington headquarters is to blame for the reluctance to deploy Microsoft's new software. "It has less to do with technical concerns about Microsoft and more to do with the fact that with our July move, our plates are totally full and we can't take another thing on right now," she said in an interview today after a speech at the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders conference in Palm Desert, Calif.

MARAD has already begun testing Vista and IE 7, according to Seymour. That testing, however, may take time because MARAD relies extensively on old, custom applications that will require long evaluation on Vista. She has not yet set an upgrade timetable, but if or when she does, Seymour said, she can add Vista and Office without spending additional money; MARAD has a Software Assurance contract with Microsoft.

Even if her department doesn't widely deploy Vista and Office 2007 until early 2009, "we would be middle of the pack among private corporations and somewhat ahead of most government agencies," Seymour claimed.

In late January, Daniel Mintz, the DOT's CIO, issued an internal memo slapping a moratorium on upgrading desktops and laptops to Vista, the Office 2007 business suite and IE7, the revamped browser Microsoft released last October. "This establishes an indefinite moratorium until further notice on desktop/laptop computer software upgrades to Microsoft Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer version 7," the DOT memo read. "Microsoft Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer may be acquired for testing purposes only."

[JohnnyMalaria]

Quite normal, prudent strategy for a large organization.

[RLT69]

DOT Bans Vista Upgrades
CIO cites cost and compatibility issues.

Citing concerns about cost and system compatibility, the CIO of the federal Department of Transportation has put a hold on DOT upgrades to Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, Internet Explorer 7, and Office 2007.

The agency has an "indefinite moratorium" on upgrades because "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading," CIO Daniel Mintz says in a Jan. 19 staff memo obtained by InformationWeek. In addition, there are "specific reasons not to upgrade," he says, referring to compatibility with software apps, upgrade costs, and an upcoming move to a new headquarters. The ban applies to 15,000 DOT computer users who now use Windows XP Professional. The memo indicates that a similar ban is in effect at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has 45,000 desktop users.

DOT CTO Tim Schmidt said last week that the ban remains in effect and that the department is exploring other options, including Novell's SUSE Linux and, for a subset of users, Apple's Macintosh hardware and software.

http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197700911


The FAA is looking not to upgrade as well:

FAA May Ditch Microsoft's Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo

FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he's taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency's Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops.

http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197800480

Our own organization is not looking to upgrade for at least two years - not until our next upgrade cycle.

[rkr1958]

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Upgrading for the sake of upgrading is a no-win situation. You gain nothing if it works and you have a lot to lose if it doesn't.

[dnix71]

I have a coworker who just bought a new laptop that came with Vista, and he came almost crying to me today to find a way to erase it and put XP on it. His laptop is a Celeron based and will never run Vista properly. If the government wants to 'upgrade' to Vista they will have to buy much better than the low bid for hardware. Just because it's new doesn't mean it will actually work.

[guns1inger]

many companies and government departments will take 2 - 3 years to upgrade to Vista because this is their normal hardware lease/upgrade cycle. So it was with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 and Windows XP. No-one in their right mind jumps in on day one.

As for switching desktops to Linux and Google apps . . . . . Having worked in consulting in the big 4 for many years (thankfully out now) I have seen companies claim to be looking into doing this many times. I have seen precisely none actually do it. A few times they were actually serious, but the TCO just didn't add up when they took into account re-training all their users, the extra help desk calls they were going to get etc. Mostly though these types of claims hit the newspaper around the time these (usually very large) companies were looking at negotiating new volume license agreements with M$. And they inevitably came to an agreement and stayed with M$.

[oldandinthe way]

It ain't news. Standard and prudent behavior. Typically the labor and training costs associated with new applications or O/S exceed the cost of both the software and hardware.

[joepic]

If it's not good enough for Intel, is it good enough for you? We're talking Microsoft's Windows Vista, which the chip giant's CEO, Paul Otellini, this week indicated has not won the backing of his technology experts.

"I know of no organisation doing an upgrade before [Service Pack 1]," Paul Otellini told attendees of the Bank of America Technology Conference held in San Francisco this week, according to a ZDnet blog. "Intel isn't upgrading either."

Vista is "closer to the Mac than we've been on the Windows side for a long time", Otellini added. Otellini has praised the Apple operating system before, and is believed to have played a key role in persuading the Mac maker to adopt his company's processor technology.

A Microsoft's operating system's first Service Pack - what MS calls major updates - usually patches an array of glitches discovered in the initial version of the product.

While that approach may persuade big business to delay upgrading, consumers are more likely to be grabbed by the new OS' slick visuals. But even in this segment of the market, demand will take time to build up as folk buy new PCs with Vista pre-installed and get a chance to play with it, Otellini indicated.

[DereX888]

I have a coworker who just bought a new laptop that came with Vista, and he came almost crying to me today to find a way to erase it and put XP on it. His laptop is a Celeron based and will never run Vista properly. If the government wants to 'upgrade' to Vista they will have to buy much better than the low bid for hardware. Just because it's new doesn't mean it will actually work.

Same as people downgrading their slow Pentium II based laptops with Win2K to WinXP few years ago.
Nothing new.
What surprises me, is th dishonest vendor who sold underpowered laptop with bloated and resource hungry OS to your coworker.
Such behaviour deserves a law suit, but since there's no money in it, no lawyer would take up such case... if your coworker would have been cheated on purchase of a truck with the motor from say Honda Civic, it would have been different story...

Thats where MACs 'philosophy' is actually good:
you can't just upgrade older hardware/OS version with OS X just because you want to

[BJ_M]

not video related news -- moving

[LSchafroth]

many companies and government departments will take 2 - 3 years to upgrade to Vista because this is their normal hardware lease/upgrade cycle. So it was with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 and Windows XP. No-one in their right mind jumps in on day one.

I'm building systems for a large nationwide insurance company and they are rolling out there XP systems with the all new SP1 installed on them.

LS

[oldandinthe way]

[quote="DereX888"]What surprises me, is th dishonest vendor who sold underpowered laptop with bloated and resource hungry OS to your coworker.
/quote]

Pick up last Sunday's newspaper and you will see several "low-ball" laptops with Vista. The price is better than anything you would expect to find. If they had XP they'd be a bargain. If you don't know what you are buying, you shouldn't let a "great deal" make you buy the wrong system.

With a memory upgrade his machine might become acceptable, or for a little more he could buy XP and load it. But if he is such a technological dunce, he'd probably never get the right drivers on his laptop.

[guns1inger]

as usual, Microsoft's minimum spec is just enough to run the OS, and hence not fall under false advertising, but you can run anything but the calculator on top of it without slowing to a crawl. I have recently upgraded a two year old Toshiba notebook to Vista Business. It has a 1.7 P4 mobile CPU, and had 512 MB or memory. Vista boots up to be around 340 MB (including the usual anti-virus, anti-spyware and assorted corporate network crap). XP used to boot in around 280MB. Running Outlook 2007 and Firefox on top of this was workable under Vista, but not pleasant. As this was a test case, I was able to get more memory purchased (usually a hard ask) and bumped it up to 1.5 GB RAM. It now flys along, and is much smoother and boots much faster than XP.

There are still driver issues, as manufacturers finally start to pull their collective fingers out, and some of the ones that are available aren't very good (*cough* HP printer drivers *cough*), so I certainly wouldn't be deploying on a widescale for some time. I have also had some minor compatibility quibbles form some small freeware apps, but so far everything else has run quite happily, including Photoshop 7, and 3DS Max version 8, both older apps.

I am in no hurry to upgrade my home PC at this stage, as I'm still wary of the video side of things, but I am certainly not in any hurry to remove it from the laptop. But memory, and plenty of it, seems to be the key to getting the best performance. Much more so that a faster CPU.

[Ron B]

I just got Premiere Pro 2.0 and(was it here?) I read that it will not run on Vista. So for my small business, my interest in going to Vista is zero. If I build a new computer in the next year and I have to make a decision on which OS to go with, that might be a tough call.