A lot of people I talk to about Microsoft’s Windows Vista all seem to take the same stance on when they will start using it: Service Pack 1. It’s like some magical point in the development of Windows Vista when the OS will suddenly become acceptable to use.
eWeek has taken an in-depth look at this issue, and they’ve discovered that this same train of thought is widespread throughout many large companies.
"A big psychological blocker inside many large companies is the belief that Microsoft products shouldn’t be adopted until after the first major patch or service pack has been released," said Lee Nicholls, global solutions director at Getronics, a workspace management services company. I see a good deal of companies holding back until they feel the product is stable and fixed."
This is obviously codswallop, as most of the patches and fixes to be included in SP1 for Vista will have already been released by the time it is released.
Microsoft tried to tell people that they could pick up Vista from the get-go and run with it, but with so much critical coverage upon release, a lot of problems with Vista were repeatedly pointed out and many times, blown out of proportion.
Having said that, XP is still superior, performance wise, to Vista, with recent benchmarking performed by exo.blog (here and here) showing that there is a large gap that even Vista Service Pack 1 cannot recover.
What’s even more interesting is that the new Windows XP Service Pack 3 has delivered an impressive performance increase over XP SP2, widening the gap between XP and Vista even further. Why would businesses, or even home users, want to move to an operating system that is obviously not going to run as well as XP does on their current hardware.
Microsoft has claimed that performance increases will be seen when Vista SP1 is released next year, so there may still be hope. For the time being though, I think most companies (and individuals) will continue to stick with XP.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
[via eWeek]
