From a development perspective: How do I convice the bosses to upgrade to Vista / Windows 7?

Question

Our current development environment at work is Windows XP pro. It is a fine operating system, but after using Vista and Windows 7 at home, I find myself wanting to use them at work where I spend majority of my time on a computer.

The problem lies in that Windows XP does the job, and there's 0 cost in moving forward as obviously its already in place and working, whereas Vista / Windows 7 would obviously cost money and time in the short term, but I believe in the long run we'll all be more productive in either a Vista or 7 environment.

So my question is how do I convince the decision makers to upgrade to at least Vista, I understand the service pack 1 rule, and am happy to accommodate that. (i.e. Vista now, 7 later).

Arguments can be from a .Net programmers perspective as we're all developers where I work.

Answer 1

It all depends on the size of your enterprise.

We have more than 10000 workstations to manage, and that is the main reason we are still in XPSP2.

An OS comes with lots of group policy rules, which must be tested.
It also comes with custom software (anti-virus, limitation of the user's profile space, ...) which must be evaluated/upgraded.

In short, moving to a new OS is not a trivial task. The migration/deployment process alone takes month. And it is only one step. All the training of the support team must have been made beforehand.

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Now, for a small company, the work involved is still not trivial.

• licenses need to be updated
• compatibility or upgrade of all softwares and drivers needs to be ascertained.
• policies and security needs to be reviewed

All of this makes sense if the behavior of the program you are writing is not too different than the intended target.

If the vast majority of users will use your application on Xp, whereas you are developing on Vista or W7, you may end up detecting issue not one the development phase, but during the homologation or pre-production steps, which makes any fix that much harder to do.

In the end, It is about ROI. What productivity will you gain, and what advantage this new development platform will bring in term of time-to-market for your application ?

Answer 2

We've used the following argument to run the latest Office and IE versions:

Our applications need to be prepared for the next version, so if the whole company makes the switch, we know our applications work in the new versions, and we have experience solving certain compatibility problems.

Of course it could be argued that this are what VM's are for, but we've chosen the other way around, use VM's to test for older versions.

Our company has > 6000 computers, so we offered to not get corporate support on the software we've upgraded ourself.

We'd also liked upgrading our OS, but the Novell server version has no compatible Vista client.

Answer 3

The best reason I can think of for upgrading to to Vista is to utilize hardware better. I just upgraded my machine to quad core CPU and 8 GB ram. With Vista 64 bit everything just runs like a dream. Much less swapping and everything just seems to be going quite a bit faster.

With hardware prices as they are, there is really no reason to struggle with less memory. Of course your IT department may look at it differently, but from a developer's point of view a fast machine with lots of memory is the way to go.

Answer 4

I'm definitely going to be accused of FUD slinging for this, but Vista? Seriously?

This is contrary to most peoples experience I think, it's dubious (1,2,3,4) if your productivity will go up at all. There's a core of developers who think the upgrade is in the other direction or can be better achieved with XP addons, and then there's pessimistic speculation that you should buy the licences only. Not to pretend that pro opinions don't exist.

For the cost (and don't forget there's going to be hardware upgrades and missing drivers) there's little apparent gain (the big USP is supposed to be security which no company should ever let the OS handle anyway). If you were talking about servers 2k3 -> 2k8 that would be a much more reasonable sell, but as far as I can see the best reason to push to vista is because eventually you'll have to.

Answer 5

I'm with annakata here, seriously? Vista for development?

Answer 6

Because Jon Skeet uses Vista ;-)