WindowsITPro was asking its readers about their plans for upgrading to Windows Vista.

Of the 551 survey respondents, 39.6 percent said they had no Vista plans. However, 29.6 percent plan to move to Vista within one year of its release, 24.4 percent within two years, and 6.4 percent within three years.

These numbers seem to be quite high for me. Maybe the typical WindowsITPro reader is a Windows fan, and therefore, is willing to upgrade earlier than others.

Or maybe these numbers seem too high for me because I live in Germany. Do you know the main reason behind the city of Munich’s plan to move to Linux with its 14,000 clients? They were annoyed that Microsoft ended the support for Windows NT! As far as I know they did not make that move yet, so most of their clients probably are still running under Windows NT.

Okay, that might be a special case, even for Germany. However, many people I talk to tell me that they need no new OS. They can do all they want with their current system. They can surf the web, write emails, play their games etc. So why move to a new Windows?

I have been hearing similar arguments for more than 15 years now, and they are always wrong. Most PC users just can’t imagine the new things they can do with a new OS. They only realize that they’re somehow left behind after the new version has been out for a while.

This is especially true for system administrators. I am sure that Vista has tons of features which the media did not even talk about yet. From my experience there is at least one, which you’d really want to have.

I belong to the 29.6 percent. We will probably start at the beginning of next year with only a small number of about 60 or 70 PCs though. This way we will get some experience deploying Windows Vista.