One of the main reasons cited is no time and resources to upgrade. And that is probably strongly related to the current recession.
It seems "only human" for people to cut back and save when the economy is bad, but unfortunately that is also the wrong thing to do in order for the economy to recover, and the wrong way to reboot a business. Now is exactly the time for companies to be investing in their futures, and I.T. is one of those major spending areas. With smart spending today, they could be extremely well positioned in a year or two.
A related problem is that I've yet to witness an I.T. group that operates incrementally, or in a parallel testing fashion; it seems that everything has to become a snowball in order to happen at all.
There are ways to make upgrades perfectly safe, and achievable over a longer period of time when resources are scarce. For example, machines could be upgraded a few at a time in isolation (ideally with a production-like parallel test environment), starting with the more experienced users. And, the culture could evolve to commit to incremental improvements in business applications on a regular basis, so that change is expected instead of being some rare event that scares everyone and threatens to tear the company apart at the seams.
That's what our company does, but there are still significant costs associated with it. Even if you only want to upgrade a few machines at a time, you probably still have to purchase licenses for everyone, especially if you want to get bulk licensing deals. Working with Microsoft's pricing system is complicated enough without trying to incrementally purchase from them. So, it's often easier just to avoid the upgrade process altogether.
For instance, you tell the vendor that your entire site upgrade is contingent on having access to betas, previews, or some limited number of licenses for X number of months so that you may port and test your internal applications. This is hardly an uncommon problem when upgrading, and it's a good bet for a software vendor to allow small samples for a short period in order to enable larger purchases.
It also doesn't hurt to remind vendors of what you could be doing instead of putting up with them. Tell Microsoft you'll virtualize all of Windows on Mac OS X. Tell them you've been impressed lately by OpenOffice 3. It doesn't even matter if you have a real intention to switch, they just have to believe that you will.
I don't think you've ever dealt with Microsoft before. You can do some of the usual negotiating, but there is no strong-arming them. They have pretty fixed pricing models and are only willing to work with you to a point. Other software vendors, sure, they'll do almost anything to make a sale, but Microsoft is in a whole different universe of software distribution.
> unfortunately that is also the wrong thing to do in order for the economy to recover
I know this is what the newspapers say, but it's not clear to me that it's true. Saving implies that someone out there is paying interest for the privilege of using your money, and that in your own opinion, whatever they're doing is a better use than whatever you'd be spending it on if you had to spend it. Saying you should spend instead of save to help the economy sounds like saying you should deliberately lose money (if you thought it would make more money, you'd be doing it already, right?) to help other people make it... that is, you should be a charity.
Actually, it's great news for Microsoft, since the market share for Vista is less than 20% (http://e-janco.com/browser.htm), and I'm guessing almost all of those are home users who got it by default. 40% is great if your market share was closer to 0% previously. :)
But their market share is still going to be nearly 100% of companies..
Market share isn't a metric of how many people are using Microsofts latest OS compared to other vendors. It's how many people are using Windows (any version) vs other vendors.
Well MS might just end the support on Vista someday and then companies would have to upgrade to 7 or end up with an unsupported product.
Or you buy some new office machines and they'll have 7 preinstalled (so you have to spend extra cash to "downgrade").
I think once you're locked in to Microsoft products it's not entirely up to you if you can "skip".
They'd have to end the support on XP first to get people to upgrade to Vista before such a threat would make sense.
August 4, 2014 is still some time away and anybody that doesn't like spending big $ on license fees supporting a large number of desktops or servers is looking forward to that day with a lot of fear.
For every x number of 'skippers' there is a number of users that will never come back.
Another possibility is that XP worked Microsoft out of a "job" (upgrade cycle) by coming, over its life cycle, to be extremely rock-solid.
Most upgrade cycles are initiated by a perceived lack of future compatibility in a fairly imminent time frame. If compatibility is expected indefinitely, there just isn't an incentive.
The companies cite "lack of time and resources" as the reason they won't upgrade. What does this include? Training? IT support time? Actual put-the-disc-in-the-machine-and-wait time?
Existing software & driver compatibility, hardware compatibility (and cost of replacing old kit), roll-out time and user training are just the beginning.
Enterprise-scale rollouts for new software are never as simple as "putting the disc in the machine and waiting".
Splitscrean in Ubuntu is actually quite easy with Nvidia's driver package. I don't know what kind of granular access control Window's 7 has, but I can't imagine it's more granular than the functionality Unix can provide through groups. There are also several terminal emulators that easily match Powershell.
The only thing Windows has going for it is proper DPI scaling for all apps. Everything else is just Windows playing catchup with technologies that have been deployed on Unix systems for years.
Also realize that half of the features you mention have to do with driver support, and nothing with the actual engineering of the OS. Just becuase Microsoft can use its clout to force vendors to write dirvers for its OS doesn't say anything about the OS itself.
Unix apps use userhelper symlinks and pam service files (which may invoke group memberships) as equivalent to Windows UAC. Userhelper (or gksudo instead) is either off or on. There is no 'on for particularly sensitive operations, off for others' levels per Windows 7.
Also no Unix has a shell with object pipelining. Ie, you can run 'ps | where starttime < 2 hours' on Unix, you'd need to screenscrape using regexs (ie, sed / awk / etc). Powershell provides a separation between presentation and data that's quite refreshing. There are nix equivalents of this concept, they they're unstable and have very few commands available.
There is not a single driver on Unix, proprietary or OSS, that provides proper perfectly crisp DPI scaling for all applications in X. Nor do I believe this would be handled at the driver layer, but more the GTK (or QT etc) layer as it is for MFC in Windows.
Neither granular access control, object pipelining, or application DPI scaling are driver related.
Also, now I've worked out what you meant: win left and win right are window management shortcuts to maximise vertically and size to 50% horizonally. Nothing to do with multihead.
It's likely one of the less common window managers implements something similar, but GNOME, XFCE and KDE do not (and to use those other window managers, you'd lose support for freedesktop.org shortcut files and have to recreate your menus).
What seems to matter now is the investment that companies have made in all their software. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if that investment was wise, or if the alternatives might be better; any transition is believed to be too risky, expensive, or even unnecessary.
So far, the only thing that seems to make a dent is a system that allows virtualization of Windows. If you want to help rid the world of Windows, then you need to start there: build perfect compatibility in a sandbox, while making something obviously superior that runs outside the sandbox.
It seems "only human" for people to cut back and save when the economy is bad, but unfortunately that is also the wrong thing to do in order for the economy to recover, and the wrong way to reboot a business. Now is exactly the time for companies to be investing in their futures, and I.T. is one of those major spending areas. With smart spending today, they could be extremely well positioned in a year or two.
A related problem is that I've yet to witness an I.T. group that operates incrementally, or in a parallel testing fashion; it seems that everything has to become a snowball in order to happen at all.
There are ways to make upgrades perfectly safe, and achievable over a longer period of time when resources are scarce. For example, machines could be upgraded a few at a time in isolation (ideally with a production-like parallel test environment), starting with the more experienced users. And, the culture could evolve to commit to incremental improvements in business applications on a regular basis, so that change is expected instead of being some rare event that scares everyone and threatens to tear the company apart at the seams.