Who's Upgrading?

None of the Gold Partners we interviewed said that they had complete enterprises moved to Vista, aside from one who had a few "mom and pop shops," where the owner wanted to have the latest and greatest software, with the new bells and whistles and laptop intermobility. However, the vendor who mentioned this situation said that those clients often roll back to XP due to compatibility issues, or because they see a decrease in performance. In most cases, Vista has been installed in small numbers of workstations within companies, to move them to Vista slowly.

At least one vendor thinks that this is an especially good idea. Putnam says that about five percent of his 500 client companies have adopted Vista to some extent, but that his approach is to take it inch by inch. "Our typical approach is to move over some early adopters within the company to Vista first. We make them the evangelists; they're the people who like to use new technology anyway. In any company you've got people who are hesitant to change, and you have people who seek and like change. So, we try to find those who like it first and get them using it. They get familiar with it, and then we move the rest of the company. At that point, the rest of the company can go to those people who were early adopters and get information from them. Usually those same people who like be on the forefront also like to be known as the experts or the trainers. We try to develop some technology evangelists inside the company to share with the rest of the company. So, right now that's where we are with the companies who have expressed a desire to migrate to Vista. We've done the rollout for the technology evangelists, we're giving that a few months, and then we'll roll out the rest of the company."

Microsoft Support, Cost Of Installation, And Time To Adoption

None of the VARs we spoke with had called Microsoft for support, because they all figured that the problems they ran into were on the shoulders of vendors who needed to upgrade their products and services to support the new environment. As for installation cost, it typically ranged from around $150 to $230 per machine, not including hardware upgrades.

Pearlstein believes that the biggest cost that enterprises will incur will be in training. Dunkley, who is beginning to deploy Vista in five locations, mentioned that it is much cheaper to install Vista in a managed environment. He describes a managed environment as "an infrastructure that facilitates the automation of manual tasks that would typically be required during deployment and maintenance, and provides an end to end solution for desktop management." A machine in an environment like this requires much less babysitting and clicking on options during installation.

These vendors said that they expected a full-fledged Vista rollout to occur anywhere from Q2 to Q4 of this year, after all of the drivers are out. At that time, it's also likely that any new PC sold will be both Vista ready and have it preinstalled. Some vendors mentioned other reasons to wait. "Always wait until SP1. SP1 is what we call the true release to market. Microsoft tries to cover as many issues as possible, but come on, they can't emulate 2,000 different environments, or for that matter 40,000 or 400,000," Pearlstein says.

"I think the market as a whole is going to be reluctant to make the change at least until the fourth quarter of 2007," Stark says. "There are going to be a lot of training issues and a lot of user questions. There are going to be a lot of hardware requirements that the industry isn't ready for yet. It's going to have to fork over a lot of money. It's going to be a major change, it's going to take time, it's going to take patience and it's going to take a movement. This operating system upgrade or change is probably going to be one of the hardest for Microsoft to get the industry to adopt."

And Yet, They Use It

Just because a VAR is reluctant to install Vista in a client's environment, that doesn't mean they won't take the plunge themselves. "I think it's definitely leaps and bounds above XP," Dunkley says. "Once people get used to it, they'll see the real benefits. I like the searching capabilities, and a lot of the remote mobile tools that it provides, as well as being able to access all the different settings that you need to modify. I have tons and tons of documents and emails, and the searching capability allows me to just go in and search and find them right away. It should definitely enhance people's productivity."

"Vista's been great to me," Ford says. "I run it on a Dell laptop and have had it installed for months now, and it's working fantastically. Performance-wise it's working well. The new tools for performance analysis do exactly what they say they do. We're looking forward to integration with Longhorn."

"I'm using it on my own desktop right now," Stark says. "I like it very much. I think a lot of misinformation has been spread about Vista that seems to get spread any time a new operating system is released. Whenever a new OS is released I hear that it's buggy and that it's incompatible with everything. I personally haven't found that to be the case, so I'm very happy with it. I would say that it's very resource intensive. That's why we install it on new computers. If you don't have a machine with lots of resources, in particular a good video card, I wouldn't recommend it.

Vista On The Horizon

As you can see, installing a new operating system in an enterprise environment is a far cry from installing it on a personal machine. There are just too many variables, and often incompatibilities aren't discovered until the OS is installed, which can disrupt or even halt business operations.

That said, regardless of the situation today, all of the Microsoft Gold Partners that we interviewed seemed to believe that Windows Vista will be in full blown release in businesses by the end of the year. For the most part, they themselves were impressed with the OS. But then, they're VARs, and their job is to make things work.

It seems as though the challenge lies less with Microsoft than with vendors who have products that interface with the new system. Once those drivers come around, you'll more than likely be seeing Vista on your desktop at work. And, you'll likely have new hardware to keep it up to speed.