Until 2010 I worked for General Motors/Toyota . You might call them a large business, or you may not. It depends upon your way of thinking. There were 5700 employees in our plant, covering 5.6 million square feet. We used IE 5, SQL Server 2000, Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6, and other out dated software. I had to have special permission to use the latest Microsoft products.
It is really up to the corporate mentality to decide what software/hardware will be used. Do not consider the possibility of convincing a corporate head that his/her way of thinking is outmoded! Our goal was to crank out 1000 cars and trucks five days a week. Nothing else mattered. You can argue about productivity and whatever else you wish but you are wasting your time.
Your arguments would have fallen upon deaf ears and would not be worthy of consideration. When the automobile industry thinks it can save one penny (even at the cost of human lives) it will! Our attorneys would weigh the cost savings vs lawsuits and the company would act accordingly. Productivity? You have no clue!
>And what she didn't take into account is productivity. Faster computers, less system crashes, fewer viruses to deal with. Then go on to things like discovering things in Office that were hidden in the menus. Things that the user didn't know were there that make their job easier, and hence they get more work done. They are doing the owners and their customers a disservice by not upgrading. In the mean time, their competitors are using newer technology and taking business away.
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>Here's one report on ROI for SMALL business
http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/business/archive/2010/06/29/research-study-reports-business-value-of-windows-7.aspx>
>And another
http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/news/article.php/3889796/Windows-7-Promises-Quick-ROI-for-SMBs.htm>
>It's a good bet I can find more.
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>>I am sure those ROI figures are correct for corporations and large businesses. The figures are very good for Microsoft's bottom line. but in my experience, small business often don't find that to be the case. Most of the apps I write are business solutions for companies with fewer than 25 employees (the vast majority are fewer than 10 employees.) Most of the apps employ office automation componenets. One client estimated that new hardware equipped with Windows 7 and Office 2007 reduced her business' productivity by half for at least 3 months. She singled out ribbon menus as being less logical/more arbitrary than their previous version of Office and features that were missing or worked differently in the OS as the major culprits. Larger businesses have IT departments and can offer employee training. Small businesses don't have those resources to help them with the steep learning curve.
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>>Even medium-sized businesses may not reap immediate gains in productivity. A simple upgrade from Office 2007 to 2010, declared by Microsoft to be "transparent" and "fully backward compatible", went very wrong for one client in August. The upgrade was done over a weekend and by 7:01 am Monday, the entire network was down and would remain so for a day and a half--until Office 2007 could be restored. The undocumented change in Office 2010 was eventually located and and a work-around for it was devised, but that took 2 months.
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>>In my experience new isn't always better and change for the sake of change rarely pays off :-) There are still a lot of XP workstations out there in my client base and I estimate they will be there for a while yet.
