A New World on the Business Desktop?

There are three threads on Slashdot.org that, taken together, offer an interesting look into what might be happening in corporate computing. A Computerworld article quotes a study from a third party software vendor indicating that a vast majority of businesses have any intention of moving their computers to Microsoft Vista:

In a just-released poll of more than 250 of its clients, PatchLink noted that only 2% said they are already running Vista, while another 9% said they planned to roll out Vista in the next three months. A landslide majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version(s) of Windows.

Those numbers contrasted with a similar survey the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based vendor published in December 2006. At the time, 43% said they had plans to move to Vista, while just 53% planned to keep what Windows they had.

That's a big difference from what I've seen in past cycles. Old versions of Windows would stick around for years - far longer than most people generally thought. I can remember that when Windows 95 came out, at least a third of companies were still running some amount of Windows 3.1 several years after the new platform's introduction. Businesses prefer the devil they know.

But if this study is actually representative, then the results have to be stoking the fear furnaces in Redmond. The company simply cannot survive financially without heavy adoption of new versions of Windows, and business buyers have generally been more pervasive adopters. New machines will likely run with some version of Windows, but Microsoft also needs older machines to upgrade. Here's another clip from the article:

Although Microsoft recently announced it had shipped 60 million copies of Vista so far, it has declined to specify how many buyers are businesses, or even what percentage of the estimated 42 million PCs covered by corporate license agreements have actually upgraded to Vista.

What is the problem? The article speculates that it may be because of changed perceptions of what Vista would add from the security front. My guess is that the reluctance has much more to do with the many problems that people have reported with Vista - often slow operation, even on machines designed for it, and the difficulty in installing the operating system on existing machines. Comapnies like hardware to last at least 3 to 5 years. If you want to upgrade to Vista, you pretty much have to go for new or very recent hardware, as I understand it. That means the software has an effective added cost of at least hundreds of dollars, which is really expensive, particularly if you have to replace a whole lot of machines.

Attempts to supplant Microsoft's dominance in the office software world by an open standard not owned by any one party seem to have gone nowhere. LinuxWorld basically threw in the towel on the OpenDocument standard. So Microsoft is probably safe on that front - for now. But if the OS landscape starts to change, then its grip on other aspects of software life might also loosen.

And now we add the third thread. CareGroup CIO John Halamka, an influential chief information officer, has been publicly testing various desktop operating systems, reporting on progress in CIO Magazine, and sees a shift in strategies that is starting to make sense:

"A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008," says Halamka. "I’ll continue to watch the marketplace evolve and report on my progress. For now, the only devices I’ll be carrying are a Dell D420 with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and a BlackBerry 8707H e-mail device."

If a few other influenctial CIOs also start moving down this route, business as a whole could see the biggest single computing realignment since the shift from the mainframe to the PC.

Strange Sitings from the PC Wars

The PC market is an obviously competitive one, but some stories (via Slashdot.org) show a number of odd things happening right now. For example, Microsoft is apparently in a sales jam, because it has launched a "fact rich" program to convince customers that they should adopt Vista now, according to The Investigator blog at APCMag.com:

"Some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release," the company said in a newsletter.

"To help partners and customers get the real story, Microsoft has created a comprehensive set of fact-rich materials illustrating how Windows Vista is ready today and tomorrow."

However, a link in the newsletter leads customers to a place only available to computer makers that will sign a non-disclosure agreement - which pretty much means that they can't tell you what they just read, and so, theoretically, can't pass on any of the information they just learned. But then, the story proceeds:

What we do know, however, is that Vista service pack 1 is, in the company's own words, designed to address "deployment blockers and high impact issues", suggesting that until the release of SP1, you will have to contend with ... deployment blockers and high impact issues. Hardly the basis for proceeding with confidence.

Maybe the facts are a little too rich for customers. But this puts Microsoft into an awkward position. They clearly released the system before it was ready to use - probably because of pressure of hardware manufacturers and, possibly, demands from those corporate clients that had already paid for the product through site licensing of Windows.

Money has to be a big issue. Yes, Microsoft got a big financial boost earlier this year and was claiming market success with Vista. But what many journalists covering the story missed was that the company does a lot of this site licensing. By accounting standards, although they collect the money, they don't get to treat it as income until they ship a product. Lack the income, and your stock looks bad. But now it's gone through that initial wave and needs the next chunk of money, which generally means the smaller purchases and consumer sales.

But people aren't adopting the way management wants and needs because Vista has received such bad press about the "deployment blockers and high impact issues." In other words, if your computer isn't pretty new, it won't work, and even if you do have a new machine, the system can run incredibly slow, as I've heard from people I know who are using it.

So what might happen is maybe another quarter of "good" results but then a pot hole when the continued sales don't continue. It sounds like Microsoft was hoping that people would buy anyway because, well, they always have. But I think users are tired of paying for complete and total crap. That's why Dell has started selling XP on systems again and why Linux continues to expand, particularly with Ubuntu offering what is supposed to be a more user-friendly version.

This all makes the second story sound even odder: Dell refuses to sell a system with Ubuntu to a business. So why won't it? Is there some licensing agreement with Microsoft or someone else that makes it impossible for them to do so? Or do they want to upsell into a more expensive model with an operating system that adds a bit of additional margin dollars?

What is going on with these companies? They seem to have lost sight of how important customers are. To play such games - because that's what they are, playing with people for your own ends - is essentially is the essence of the con job. You may not get caught, but when you do, it's painful. Better to forgo some profit today and keep your customers than to pump up your numbers for one quarter and find that no one likes doing business with you.