Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer said that Citigroup plans to upgrade 500,000 PCs to Vista in the next 13 to 14 months according to a report coming out of ComputerWorld. He could certainly use the good news right about now what with Vista’s failure in both the US where it isn’t selling well and in China where Microsoft sold only 244 genuine copies.

Apparently, government agencies have actually not banned Vista where Microsoft expects to finalize Vista upgrade deals with a number of federal agencies in the next few months.  I tend to think this is PR posturing and nothing more in the case of the government agencies which tend to not like change.

As for Citigroup, a spokeswoman confirmed that 325,000 of their computers will be upgraded to Vista by July but they may not be updating their laptops just yet. A Smart move considering Vista likes draining the battery on laptops faster and will tend to bog down laptops more since they tend to be not as powerful as their desktop counterparts as a general rule.

And yet, Citigroup is laying off 17,000 employees involved in IT operations. I could make a joke here and I think I will. Are they laying off those 17,000 people to help mitigate the costs of the upgrade to Vista because it goes without saying there are going to be issues and problems galore when Vista gets installed and they are going to need the IT department which has now been downsized, yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Not really.

Ballmer has said “I’m not arguing with the idea that it [Vista adoption] has not been fast, it’s just not that much different from other operating system releases.” But I’m afraid it is. Vista is not to XP as XP was to ME. It is evolutionary but it’s certainly not revolutionary. Yes, driver integration is tighter and better in some cases, updates are easier and don’t require as many restarts, it has integrated desktop search that actually works, ReadyBoost, DirectX 10 which is a boon to gamers and it’s ever so slightly more reliable.

To me, this is worth $112 but I cannot answer that question for you. If all you are interested in is the GUI effects, I suggest checking out ObjectDesktop. If your PC can support the upgrade to Vista and you aren’t tied to the (software) past then I say go for it.

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Entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 4:26 am under Microsoft, Vista.  Print This Post

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