Cost of user education outweighs value of upgrade

Implications: 1.  There are no compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista 2.  Security within email has improved causing less upgrade needs

Analysis: There was a time I was excited about the upgrade to Windows Vista.    I like the new and improved graphics and some of the features like document search were very exciting.  As a CIO, I was also happy to see Microsoft attack their area of weakness(security).  I was ready to move to Vista.  The part of me that was a geek was ready to charge forward to Vista.

But then, the business side of my CIO role had a different view.  The training costs of my end users seemed to be a burden that I just did not think was something I wanted to do.  Plus, I was enjoying not having to upgrade machines as often and Vista needed more graphics power (translation - upgrade).  I also realized that most of my users used only a fraction of the capability of the current Windows XP, so I was convinced that my business users would use even less of Vista.

So, I was stuck with a geek's excitement and a business person's look for an ROI.  The business person won easily.  My biggest IT challenge was trying to help the business grow revenue and distracting the business by making everyone go thru an upgrade did not seem wise.

I checked with my peers and found similar answers.  Many IT staff were upgrading themselves to Vista in preparation for an upgrade.  Or IT people used multiple machines, one with Vista and one with XP.  But no one seemed excited to upgrade.  In fact, many people said to wait for service pack one at a minimum.

The article makes a valid point in that there really are no exciting end user or business features to make it compelling to upgrade.  Most of my end user security flaws happen thru email, and Microsoft has continued to improve Exchange.  So, even the security reasons seem to be handled in other ways.

So I am left waiting for a compelling reason to upgrade and seeing none on the horizon.