David King

London, UK

IT consultant

Obviously a lot of companies have spent a lot of time and effort into getting their systems working how they want, and do not want a huge upheaval of replacing the OS and software with something that looks quite different. The change from Windows 2000 to XP was easy as they two OSes look similar, but Vista is deliberately different and thus a lot of time and money would be spent by companies to get their users up to speed on Vista. With the current economic downturn, I think that more companies will be looking at free open source software to replace their current systems, as that will be a lot cheaper than going for Vista. Either way they have to retrain staff, but cheaper to train them to use something open source, which costs nothing or very little compared to Vista.