60% of Business Have no Plans to Switch to 7 in the next 18 Months at Robert Pogson

60% of Business Have no Plans to Switch to 7 in the next 18 Months

Published by Robert Pogson July 13th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

ScriptLogic has done a survey of 1000 firms and found 50% have no plan to migrate to 7 in the next 18 months.

Obviously they see no imminent need to migrate as they mostly report lack of manpower/resources as the reason for not migrating. When one sells a useless product, that is highly likely. In the current climate this means many will not be adding seats and they will be sticking with XP. Only about 18% have gone to Vista, BTW. GNU/Linux will look very good by the time they do decide to leave a 10 year old OS riddled with malware. The cost of migration to GNU/Linux for many will be less than the licensing cost of that other OS and the ongoing operating cost will be less too. This is the year of GNU/Linux.

- Robert Pogson

4 Responses to “60% of Business Have no Plans to Switch to 7 in the next 18 Months”

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1 Nik Jul 15th, 2009 at 5:35 am

You know why? Because it works. The 10-year old OS simply works for businesses, backed by the powerful infrastruture of AD Exchange Office proprietary business-speciic software.

There is no incentive to hurry an update of the workstations. Let alone think of migration to another platform.
2 Robert Pogson Jul 15th, 2009 at 8:21 am
XP/AD works for businesses that have way too much income. Any business that looks at cost/benefit for XP will see the advantages of GNU/Linux:
- three times less maintenance
- much more uptime
- much less malware
- better performance
- less need to upgrade hardware
- no per-seat licence fee
Certainly, many businesses feel XP works so “Why fix what isn’t broken?” but will they think that after the next big worm shuts them down? Will they think that when the devices they want do not come with a driver for XP?

Change in IT is inevitable. The rate of change is the only uncertainty. GNU/Linux is a viable option for most businesses at least in part.

AD is a great tool for lock-in. Many small IT departments no longer have any idea how systems could be managed without it. We had no problem using LDAP for all our needs.
3 markba Jul 16th, 2009 at 1:50 pm

> AD is a great tool for lock-in.
You can use likewise-open for this: http://www.likewise.com/products/likewise_open/
Already a standard package in the repo’s of Ubuntu. Join a AD-domain within minutes.

Once established a hybrid situation and after phasing out all non-Linux PC’s, you could migrate away to OpenLDAP and have a complete free-as-in-speech solution.
4 Robert Pogson Jul 16th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

I have used winbind/samba/pam to manage from Debian. It was not very good. AD kept pausing, giving us second-rate authentication. We were trying to access shares from the PDC.

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My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.