KEY POINTS:
As Windows upgrades go, Microsoft's Vista looks to be a rip-roaring sales success.
Since its release for large customer organisations a year ago, and for retail customers at the end of January, the company has sold more than 85 million copies of the operating system.
According to Chris Liddell, the Kiwi entrusted with looking after the finances of the world's biggest software company, Vista is flying off the shelves at almost twice the rate of its predecessor, XP.
But that doesn't mean everyone who's buying Vista is using it. In fact, XP and the even older Windows 2000 remain the operating systems of choice at most large organisations.
The reason is conservatism within the IT departments of big outfits; a home user suffers inconvenience if a new operating system has a few teething problems but a business or government department could be knocked out of action if the changeover goes wrong.
For the home user, the choice of operating system is effectively made for them. If they've bought a new computer since the start of the year from an overseas manufacturer, it's highly likely to have come with Vista.
But Liam Gunson, a senior hardware analyst at IDC in Auckland, says risk-averse commercial customers who pay an annual software licence fee to Microsoft can pick and choose.
"What's happening on the commercial side is that a lot of vendors are also shipping XP with Vista-installed PCs and then those machines are either being downgraded by the channel that sells them or by the customer," Gunson says.
Operating sytems are works in progress.
Windows XP first came on the market at the end of 2001 but has since had two major updates, in the form of service packs 1 and 2. For many customers, XP with SP2 is doing the job very nicely.
And it's standard practice in organisations with hundreds of computers to wait at least until a new operating system's first major update is released before taking the plunge.
That's the case at the Auckland University of Technology, where IT services director Liz Gosling says it's likely to be 2009 before Vista is adopted.
In addition, Vista still doesn't work well enough with the university's Novell network authentication software.
And by 2009, all of AUT's PCs will be capable of running Vista, which has a bigger appetite than XP for system memory.
"We could probably move to Vista in the middle of next year," says Gosling.
"However, making major changes such as this in the mid-year break between semester one and two is not our preferred strategy."
Gosling says Vista is supposed to be more secure than XP and its media-handling features are also promising.
"That has interesting possibilities for some of our schools."
Auckland-based engineering consultancy Beca has only good things to report from its early adoption of Vista, a process that cost the company a seven-figure sum and which it launched into even before the final version of the software was available.
But it wasn't a matter of going it alone. Chief information officer Robin Johansen say there was a good deal of hand-holding by Microsoft and IT services company Datacom during Beca's migration from Windows 2000.
The biggest issue was ensuring the company's hundreds of applications would run with Vista.
"We're a pretty complex organisation with a huge number of software packages and, because of the new security arrangements in Vista, you have to go through and test each one," Johansen says.
"That's the big effort in shifting to Vista."
Publishers of even mainstream applications have been slow to bring out Vista versions, he says, and the company still has a Windows 2000 "island" among its total population of about 2000 PCs to run one particular program.
In one sense, the move to Vista was forced on Beca. Microsoft is no longer maintaining Windows 2000, so the company had to upgrade and had to choose between XP or Vista.
Knowing that Microsoft and Datacom were ready to help "get us up the learning curve", Johansen says it was decided to leapfrog four-year-old XP.
Once software testing was done, the rollout itself was straightforward.
"The big benefits are for IT administration people," Johansen says.
A team of six was able to upgrade 170 machines a night, representing a big productivity gain.
Within a short time, helpdesk calls have fallen to pre-Vista levels, which he takes as a sign that it is more reliable than Windows 2000.
And Vista's built-in search feature, which, like Google Desktop, scours every file on your computer, including email, is a boon for users.
No government departments have yet adopted Vista but Microsoft New Zealand Windows marketer David Rayner says a couple have done initial testing.
"We've got quite a bit of work to do to get them through that more advanced testing environment," Rayner says.
For businesses, Liddell concedes, "it's still early days" in Vista adoption.
And without a release date yet for SP1, that won't be changing in a hurry.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist
Window to profit
* The first version of Windows for desktop computers - Windows 1.0 - was released in 1985.
* Windows now runs on more than 90 per cent of the world's computers.
* For every dollar in Windows sales, Microsoft makes about 75c in profit.
* In the 2007 financial year, the Windows client business generated US$15 billion ($19.7 billion) in revenue.
Source: Reuters, Microsoft
