By Julian Goldsmith, 28 November 2008 12:12
NEWS
The latest silicon.com CIO Jury has unanimously voted that they are not ready to invest in Microsoft's latest OS Vista.
When asked if they had any plans to implement Vista, which has been subject to criticism since its launch two years ago, not one of the CIOs who replied responded positively.
The results show CIOs have not warmed to the operating system over the last year. In fact, they may have cooled even further. This time last year, the CIO Jury voted 11 to one against plans to implement Vista in 2008.
CIOs and other heads of IT still believe there is little business value in migrating from XP to Vista, especially in the current economic climate.
One juror highlighted his plan to stick with XP until Windows 7 reaches a stage in development when it becomes deployable - a view echoed by several CIOs.
Mike Roberts, IT Director at private hospital, The London Clinic said: "There is little point in the expense. We will assess Windows 7 after Service Pack 1 is released because we do not want to be hit with reliability, security and compatibility issues."
However, another juror is still holding out hope for Vista, with a view to rolling it out when his next OS refresh is due in 2011.
Madhushan Gokool, head of IT at Storm Models, said: "We would only start looking at Vista at our next hardware upgrade period [which is in two years]."
Perhaps the most emphatic and comprehensive response to the question of whether to deploy Vista came from Jacques René, CIO of Ascend, who said: "No, No, No!"
In this CIO Jury was:
- Florentin Albu, Manager, ICT, EUMETSAT
- Ben Booth, European and UK CTO, Ipsos
- Pete Crowe, IT Director, Fat Face
- Mark Dearnley, CIO, C&W
- Kevin Fitzpatrick, CIO, Northern Europe, Sodexo
- Martin Frick, CIO, Avis Europe
- Madhushan Gokool, IT Manager, Storm Model Management
- Iain Hepburn, IT Director, Clarke Willmott
- Jacques René, CIO, Ascend
- Jeff Roberts, Director of IT, Norton Rose
- Mike Roberts, IT Director, The London Clinic
- Richard Storey, Head of IT, Guys & St Thomas' Hospital
Want to be part of silicon.com's CIO Jury and have your say on the hot issues for IT departments? If you are a CIO, CTO, IT director or equivalent at a large or small company in the private or public sector and you want to be part of silicon.com's CIO Jury pool, or you know an IT chief who should be, then drop us a line at editorial@silicon.com



Comments
There are 2 comments. Join the discussion
1. Daz Hughes
I'm currently playing with Windows 7 and I can truly say it's faster, cleaner, leaner and more reliable than Vista.
I've had fewer application issues than I expected (most stuff designed for Vista will run just fine).
Of course, it's a way off even beta yet, but if you have a (non mission-critical) notebook running Vista, I can recommend trying the it when it gets there. In fact, corporates should be testing their platforms with it, even if that just means sandboxes in the corner of the lab.
I would definitely consider Windows 7 to be much more like "Vista R2" than Windows 7.0.0.0.0 and see no real reason, hardware support aside, for anyone upgrading XP in a few years to even consider Vista SP2/R2 over Windows 7.
There is such a thing Microsoft as "flogging a dead horse".
2. Anthony Hunt
We can't use Vista in the office because it is incomptible with Microsoft's Mappoint.
It won't embed in MS Visual Studio 2008 applications under Vista (fine in XP of course).
There's irony for you.