subject: Users remain married to Windows 2000 posted: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 12:00:59 +0100
[no mention of unix here. but to me it seems obvious that when your
supplier tries to force you to upgrade, at your expense, or else,
it's time to crossgrade instead. No business wants to be forced to
spend money and from the article below this argument is borne out by
1 in every 2 PCs on the planet. Therefore there is a massive
financial incentive to adopt an alternative. Which is where unix
comes in .. surely now is the time to at least trial the substitution
of various Windows boxes with their unix equivalent. - Stu]
Users remain married to Windows 2000
By Gavin Clarke
Published Wednesday 15th June 2005 22:37 GMT
Microsoft's Windows 2000 client operating system is doing well for
its age, a little too well it seems on corporate desktops, according
to the latest figures.
Forty eight percent of PCs are still running Windows 2000 five years
after it was launched and just weeks before Microsoft takes its first
steps towards end-of-lifeing the operating system by finishing full-
fledged support and maintenance.
Windows 2000's market share compares to 38 per cent for Windows XP,
according to PC inventory and asset analysis company AssetMetrix.
Steve O'Hallran, managing director of AssetMetrix Research Labs, said
Windows 2000 is doing "remarkably well".
"Windows 98 and 95 are being diffused out... 2000 is next, but it's
still huge. Rather than being at 22 per cent and at the bottom of the
pack, it's at 48 per cent. Windows 2000 has been retained and plays a
significant role in most corporates," O'Hallran said. AssetMetrix
assessed 160 companies and 60,000 PCs
Those numbers may sound like great news for customers, who seem to
have jumped clear of the Microsoft operating system up-grade cycle,
but there's a catch. Customers will no-longer get feature updates
after June 30 because that's when Windows 2000 leaves Microsoft's
mainstream support phase and moves into "extended support".
Extended support appears to rule out a full Windows 2000 Service Pack
(SP) 5, a prospect that one seasoned Microsoft watcher called a
disaster for end-users in terms of managing large installations of
Windows PCs.
Michael Cherry, lead Windows and mobile analyst at Directions on
Microsoft, said users will now install different bug fixes or use the
latest security roll-up for different PCs when they need them,
instead of getting everything in a single hit that can be rolled out
to all Windows 2000 PCs with a full SP 5.
"That's a disaster... it will be very hard to manage tremendous
variations. To keep things under control and workable, and to
diagnose a problem, you have to know what's installed and what the
steady state is," Cherry said.
"If I was running a large IT shop, I'd have wanted a base level I
knew the product was at when the product left the support cycle."
O'Hallran has advised customers to begin evaluating their reasons for
staying on Windows 2000. Unless there is a strong business
justification, they should begin preparing for Longhorn, by buying
new PCs that are fat enough to support expected processor, memory and
graphics demands of the planned operating system.
Many organizations are beginning to hold off moving to Windows XP now
that Longhorn is hovering in 2006. O'Hallran, though, said customers
on volume agreements have no reason not to move to Windows XP SP 2,
because they are already entitled to the client under their
agreement. "There's no reason not to bother," he said.
Both O'Hallran and Cherry said Microsoft messed-up in delivering
Windows XP in 2001, by making the operating system appear more
tailored to consumer users than business users, with then-new
multimedia features.
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* Origin: [adminz] tech, security, support (192:168/0.2)
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