Windows XP Slow to Gain Ground

Consumers may be buying into Windows XP on new PCs, but many corporate users are still putting off plans to migrate to Microsoft's nearly one-year-old desktop operating system.

Even the recent release of the first service pack of bug fixes for XP--typically a signal for broader corporate adoption of Windows operating systems--was shrugged off by several IT managers.

A Computerworld poll of 25 Windows users in a wide range of industries found only four companies that are currently rolling out XP across their operations and four more that plan to start migrations in the coming months. Some users who are holding back on XP cite cost, the lack of a pressing business need, and recent Windows 2000 rollouts as factors in their decisions.

Business Advantages?

"We have not moved to XP, and we have no plans to. As far as I am concerned, this is an upgrade that offers nothing to a business customer," says Pat Enright, chief information officer at Clark Retail Enterprises, a convenience store chain in Oak Brook, Illinois.

In particular, users that either have completed Windows 2000 projects or are now rolling it out say they see no reason to jump to Windows XP, which they view as an incremental release over Win 2k.

"The cost is very high to [upgrade], and there's not a lot of perceived value," says Rick Waugh, a technology architect at Telus in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Jim Cullinan, a lead product manager for Windows, says Microsoft is focusing on communicating the benefits of Windows XP to companies still running Windows NT, Windows 98, and Windows 95. Those benefits include improved stability and enhanced wireless and security management features, he says.

"Most enterprise customers still have held to the tradition of waiting until Service Pack 1 to even look at it," Cullinan says. "IT spending has dried up, and it looks a little bit tighter. But IT spending should be on the rise in the coming months. We feel really good about where Windows XP is."

An April poll of 225 CIOs by Morgan Stanley showed that 60 percent of respondents had no plans to roll out Windows XP. That view has changed little since then, according to many of the IT pros interviewed for the survey.

Making the Move

But Bill Lewkowski, CIO at Metropolitan Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sees a clear need for XP. Lewkowski says the vendors that make the applications his company runs will no longer be supporting Windows 95. "Since we held off on Windows 2000 for a while, we decided we might as well jump to the new version," he says.

Navigant International, a travel services firm in Englewood, Colorado, is in the same boat. "Some of our critical software vendors skipped formal Windows 2000 support and leapfrogged from Windows 98 to Windows XP," says Navigant CIO Neville Teagarden.

But more than half of the 25 companies surveyed say a majority of their end users still run Windows NT, Windows 98, or Windows 95. "We've been driven by what our vendors will support. So far, they all support Windows 98, so we stay with 98," says Bill Finefield, CIO at the Navy Exchange Service Command in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Large companies face bigger obstacles to upgrading because of the sheer volume of PCs involved. KeyCorp, a Cleveland-based financial services firm, has migrated 11,000 of its PC users to Windows 2000, with hopes of moving its 8,000 Windows NT 4.0 users and 1,500 Windows 95 users by the end of 2003. The company has no plans to change its decision to make Windows 2000 its corporate desktop standard, according to Jeff Glover, vice president and manager of KeyCorp's desktop systems group.

Andre Mendes, chief technology integration officer at Public Broadcasting Service in Alexandria, Virginia, says he sees no need to move to XP, since Windows 2000 has been "unbelievably reliable" on his organization's 800 desktops. Its remote configuration and management features have also let him cut his help desk staff from five to two people, Mendes says.