MS Office, Vista, Windows 7, and Open Source - State of the Software	Home

State of the Market

The Microsoft family of operating system and networking software has an integral position in the information technology infrastructure for organizational enterprise - Fortune 1000 companies, government municipalities, healthcare providers and midsized and small businesses. However, internetworking and wide area networking technology is becoming increasingly non-Microsoft. Having the knowledge to integrate multiple generations of MS clients with less expensive Linux-variants and mobile computing devices - Apple's IPhone and IPad platforms and the alternative Google Android and Chrome open standard - will be important. Accordingly, the knowledge base and skillset required for effective network administration is changing and becoming more complex.

Reality in the Market - What Transpired

2006 - 2008
Microsoft launched Vista and Office 2007 in December 2006. It promoted the benefits of the joint deployment of MS Office 2007 and Vista as simplified use, lowered IT costs, and improved security. However, in most cases, the functional benefits did not justify the costs. The data and interview commentary from the major industry research firms confirmed that most organizations deployed MS Office 2007 prior to or independent of Microsoft Vista.

Reasons for migrating to MS Office prior to installing MS Vista included:

• That there were shortcomings with the drivers and certain devices.
• Approximately half of the average business PCs in North America were unable to meet the minimum requirements for the MS Vista operating system.
• Approximately 90% of business workstations did not meet the minimum system requirements for MS Vista Premium: 1GHz processor, 1GB of system memory, and advanced graphics.
• There were a large number of mobile users who were running MS Exchange for e-mail in conjunction with using Office XP or earlier versions.
• Current utilization of Windows 97 or 2000 and the requirement to interact with the MS Office XML file format.
• Requiring the functionality with the new XML and SharePoint featureset and capabilities.
• Bypassing Microsoft Vista in the short term and evaluating open source alternatives and SaaS: software as a service.

In July 2008, MS Vista and MS Office 2007 in combination, had only a 12% share of the office suite in a global market. An overwhelming majority of Microsoft clients had elected to continue using Microsoft XP as its base operating system for workstation and laptop computers. A significant number of major manufacturers were investing and selling their hardware pre-installed with open source alternatives to Microsoft Windows: Linux and UNIX.

Microsoft was also forced to acknowledge the competitive threat posed by Google in the collaboration web-based software. The collaboration software as a service business suite applications marketed by Google, are available free of charge or as a premium version with a minimal monthly charge. This technology driven software with the the web browser presenting and managing the software has presented Microsoft with significant competition and a challenge to its longstanding business model: commercial software with a dominance in market share: Windows family operating system, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Servers. Mobile computing devices were either standardizing on Google's Android operating system or waiting for Google Chrome. Microsoft's own mobile device operating system had not been accepted as an industry standard and was not competitive with the Google software.

MS Office 2007: Key Considerations
The minimum requirements for MS Office 2007 are a 500MHz processor, 256 MB RAM and 1.5 GB hard disk space. Software planning was also important; MS Windows Server 2003 or later, Microsoft Windows XP 5P2 or later and Internet Explorer 6.0 SP or later were required to support migration to the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The 2007 system is backward compatible with Office 2003 and XP so end users can open and save in the older binary format. Converters are available for Office 2003 or XP users that will allow them to open the XML format. A number of organizations, as part of the migration process, elected to streamline the presentation of the 2007 Microsoft Office system’s features to the subset required by its user population in order to run more efficiently on older resource constrained machines.

MS Vista: Key Considerations
Microsoft has discontinued widespread distribution of Windows XP.  As of July 2008, Microsoft reported that it had sold 140 million copies of Vista. However, this is less than 15% of the estimated market of 1 billion worldwide Windows users. Client and consumer feedback on MS Windows Vista was that it was slow and incompatible with a significant number of third party devices. Over the years it has been incrementally improved. However, as of the third quarter 2009, two-thirds of corporate computers were still running Windows XP.

Industry reports indicate that less than 10 percent of North American software developers have coded applications that will run on Vista.

MS Windows 7 - Successor to Windows XP and Windows Vista
Having been brought to market by Microsoft in 2001, Windows XP has been a mainstream operating system far longer than any of its MS family desktop operating system predecessors. The assumption is that most organizations and individuals will eventually upgrade to Windows 7 and it will be a long term investment. For the immediate future Microsoft will be supporting three operating systems: XP, Vista and 7.

Deployment
Microsoft has included installation and deployment tools with both Vista and Windows 7. They will be useful for organizations with 100 or fewer workstations.

For large organizations there are some excellent third party deployment options; both hardware and software.

MS Office 2007 and 2010	MS Windows Vista	MS Windows 7

Open Source Alternatives - Coexistence and Hybrid Integration

Complete Migration
For organizations that choose to run a complete migration, the benefits include avoiding the cost and inconvenience of running two versions of MS Office in parallel for the new and older versions and application and file compatibility management between the two. The downside will be the substantial investment in hardware and training.

Attrition-based Migration
For organizations that choose attrition-based migration, the benefits include obviating the large up-front investment. However, two versions of MS Office will then be running on the machine.

Computer Education Techniques technology partners report that organizations have been implementing an attrition-based migration of MS Vista, the major reason being the large up-front costs associated with a comprehensive migration. However, the announcement and roll-out of Windows 7 has resulted in an exasperating change of plans and anger in many organizations which had rolled out Vista on the assumption that it was a long term investment and that the Microsoft product software support lifecycle would be 7 to 10 years.

SYS-ED is evaluating white papers and industry benchmarks for the next generation of Microsoft software infrastructure: Windows Vista, Windows 2008 Server, Windows 7, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint Server, PowerShell, and Exchange Server.