The Rush To Windows 95: Not Everyone's Joining -- Big Corporations Hold Off, Wary Of Costs And Hassles

Mark Carlson will be one of the thousands of people who rush out to buy Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 95 program at stores today.

He'll install the software on his personal computer at home, he said, but not on any of the 300 PCs he manages at Boston Chicken Inc. Carlson wants Microsoft to work out the inevitable kinks before he puts Windows 95 on his company's computers.

Windows 95, the long-awaited computer operating system, is expected to be the best-selling software program ever. It already has drawn crowds at stores around the world with special midnight sales of Windows 95 - from Sydney, Australia, to London, Manhattan and Seattle. But most of its early sales will be to people such as Carlson the consumer, rather than Carlson the corporate user. Computer executives of some of the biggest U.S. companies say they won't install the program for months, if ever, because of the cost, training and technical hassles.

"We're not going to run out and slit our throats," said Joe Gilchrist, comptroller in charge of technology at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. "The training and costs involved in installing the program" on Goodyear's tens of thousands of PCs sprinkled in 48 countries aren't worth it.

Goodyear won't be alone: An informal survey of more than a dozen large companies didn't find a single one planning to adopt Windows 95 anytime soon.

Even companies like Fidelity Investments, which as Microsoft's largest institutional shareholder pins some of its fortunes on sales of the new system, is taking a wait-and-see approach to its technological investments.

"The regular Windows is working fine," said Karen Salvo, who works at Jamison, Eaton & Wood Inc., a money management firm in Chatham, New Jersey. "We're not making the switch to Windows 95 and we don't know when we will."

Microsoft knows the corporate customers will bide their time and says it isn't concerned. "I think when we launch. . ., sales of units to consumers will be in the millions," said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft product manager with the personal systems division. "The corporate market will ramp up in a big way a year out."

Perhaps the most notable corporate holdout is AT&T Corp., one of the biggest users of PCs with 250,000 worldwide. It still uses MS-DOS, the old text-command predecessor to the graphics-based Windows software. It has no plans to try the existing Windows system, let alone Windows 95.

Office equipment maker Xerox Corp., which has 40,000 PCs, will wait until at least the second half of next year, an executive said.

The more computers a company has, the more reluctant executives are to install the program right away.

"Based on the experience we had with previous new versions of Windows, we know there will be a lot of bugs, so we'll wait until next spring," said Edward Tunstall, information officer in charge of strategy and planning, at drug maker Eli Lilly & Co, which owns 10,000 PCs.

Counting training seminars and necessary hardware upgrades for old PCs, most companies will have to spend $500 to $1,000 per PC to install Windows 95, said Rob Enderle, a Dataquest analyst.

"When you have 40,000 to 50,000 PCs like we do, you don't screw around with a decision like this," said Stephen Andriole, chief technology officer at insurance company Cigna Corp.

Some companies have special reasons for caution because they have spent millions of dollars writing custom programs. Before switching, they will need to test Windows 95 rigorously for months to see if it works with their in-house programs.

"The first release of anything from Microsoft is never enjoyable," said Joseph Grant, vice president of global technology infrastructure at Xerox. "We have a lot of critical applications running on our network, and we have no idea how stable Windows 95 is."

Most companies eventually will have to upgrade to Windows 95, though, if they want to keep abreast of applications programs, computer experts said.

With a technological advance as pervasive as Windows 95 is likely to be, companies can't afford to wait too long, said Dataquest's Enderle.