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60% of Businesses Skipping Windows 7? Not Really

by Terrence O'Brien on July 14, 2009 at 01:40 PM

Six in Ten Businesses Skipping Windows 7? Not Really.By now, you've likely seen the headlines: "Six in 10 Companies Skipping Windows 7." It may look like doom and gloom again for Microsoft, but the real situation may not be so dour. Before writing off Windows 7 as another Redmond swing-and-miss, consider the tremendous cost of upgrading a company's worth of computers.

A recent survey from ScriptLogic (a company that makes Windows management software) does show that businesses are concerned with hardware compatibility and have skipped Windows software updates in the name of trimming costs.

According to the survey, 41-percent of businesses plan to migrate to Windows 7 by the end of 2010. The thing is, the operating system won't be released until the end of October, 2009. Businesses (especially large ones) can't simply go out and upgrade operating systems on a whim. Months of compatibility and security testing are involved, and enterprises must develop custom installation scripts to let them quickly and easily install an operating system on several thousand PCs with specific configurations and customizations. In short, upgrading to Windows 7 -- or any other OS -- is a major undertaking.

What's more, the survey doesn't say that 60-percent of businesses are skipping Windows 7, but only that they have no current plans to deploy it. Since the release is still months away, and many businesses will wait for the first Service Pack and major bug fix to deploy (as they did with Vista), this should come as no surprise. If Windows 7 is on 40-percent of business machines by the end of 2010, that will be a huge success for Microsoft; it would be a much faster adoption rate than those of either XP or Vista. [From: ScriptLogic and Reuters]

Tags: business, microsoft, operating system, OperatingSystem, top, windows, windows 7, Windows7

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