Innovative Visions

Microsoft’s long anticipated release of its next browser is finally coming to fruition around at the turn of the New Year. With it come upgrades in networking, increased multimedia functionality and a couple of other things… nothing which is going to cause you to upgrade from XP until at least the second Service Pack, in my opinion. However, there is one other little change from XP which we should take note of: A change in how their retail licenses can be used. Ed Bott, from ZDNet, has a great summary of these changes.

Here, Bott quotes the License Agreement for Windows Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate:

“Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device (physical hardware system). That device is the “licensed device.”

Now, for some businesses this won’t matter much. But for many consumers (and small businesses) who purchase retail machines loaded with an OEM license of the OS, this little change now means that you can only transfer that purchased license once… that’s it. Previously with Windows XP, you could transfer your OS license as many times as you wanted, as long as you erased the previous instance(s) of XP. With Vista, if you want to transfer an OEM/retail license to another machine (no matter what the reason), you can only do this once before your rights are used up.

This may seem like a simple idea for me, but then again this is what I do for a living. Innovative Visions acts as an extension to your company in order to provide you with a different view of your business. But let’s look at one specific example and how this can work for you.

We’re currently working with a number of small businesses who are looking to upgrade some part of their out of date infrastructure. This could be the mail server, phone systems or the firewall and security setup. Whatever it is that you’re looking to upgrade, it inevitably means an investment on your part. It could be a large investment (as compared with your normal operating expenses) or it could be rather small by comparison. But in either instance you have to justify this expense for yourself and/or your management. The key for most businesses is looking at the ROI (what is going to be the timeline and return on investment before this upgrade is paid for?). While this is crucial and should be outlined as a part of every proposal, there are other ways to justify this as well, which may involve analyzing the bigger picture.

Let’s say you need to upgrade your antiquated phone system. Say the ROI on this investment is 24 months before the system has paid for itself through productivity gains and reduced expenses. Well, what about reducing that time to 12 months by reworking your contracts for local, long distance and Internet service? It IS possible as I can tell you from experience. It’s just a matter of looking at the bigger picture and allowing your way of thinking about your business to include your technology on all levels.

Some may be surprised at what I’m about to say because of my history in technology sales and trying to increase those sales on a consistent basis. However, it is for this reason exactly that I am against MOST initiatives to upgrade your company’s software infrastructure, at least for now. I say MOST because there are still many companies who have fallen behind the eight ball with keeping their software up to date, to a point.

I know of many current and former clients who have refused to upgrade their server OS (Windows NT anyone?), desktop productivity suites (Microsoft Office ’97) or outdated and incompatible ERP/MRP systems. They often claim that the cost of upgrading is prohibitive, yet continue to spend a premium annually on customized support and interface alterations (not to mention the increased profit and efficiency which can be gained from well-planned upgrades). Now it’s fair to say that this can often be attributed to management’s perception of technology as a cost center, rather that a profit center, but more on that at another time.

Microsoft recently released its second Beta for Windows Vista (previously codenamed Longhorn) for the desktop. They are also preparing for the release of Office 2007 and Windows Server “Longhorn” all by the end of next year (see Wikipedia article). With the largest presence in the corporate software market of any other company, Microsoft seems to want to control how and when organizations upgrade their existing systems. Now I don’t see any issue with upgrading software for pertinent reasons such as efficiency, collaboration and security, but how do we determine when a software refresh just isn’t necessary?

Some of the latest features to be announced for Windows Vista are increased security (I’ll believe it when they’ve announced Service Pack 2 in the beginning of 2008 or so), better networking ability on a peer-to-peer network (does this really matter in the corporate environment?), increased desktop search functionality (I thought we were supposed to securely store everything centrally?) and other updates related to the GUI interface and user convenience. With a multitude of companies in the market creating add-ons to the traditional desktop OS (i.e. Google Desktop, Xdrive’s online storage for consumers, or using centralized storage for corporations, a good idea anyway) how are the newest features in the Windows OS going to benefit your company?

And is it really worth the cost of ensuring hardware compatibility, deployment time and effort, user and administrative training, software compatibility, etc.? I think it’s always a good idea to analyze the pros and cons of any possible upgrade thoroughly, but for the latest Microsoft creations, I’d wait to make any decisions until after their second generation (SP2) comes out for each product.