On the business side, Vista has gotten a big thumbs down, with many companies choosing to wait, or forcing Microsoft to keep extending the availability of Windows XP as a purchase option. But the Vista distaste has given way to economic realities.
"The reality is that the economic situation is causing a lot of companies (both small and large) to slow down their PC replacements and postpone non-essential projects. This is likely to impact corporate Vista deployments significantly — in a negative way," Kleynhans said.
However, Microsoft plans to end support for Windows XP on April 2014, so companies will start to feel some pressure to start migrating their computers from XP to something else and be finished by the middle of 2013.
That would be cutting it close for companies that eschew Vista, which almost half said they would do in one survey. Windows 7 deployments won't start until 2011 because it takes at least a year to get all the pieces lined up, get apps tested, get support from third parties, and so on, said Kleynhans.
Transition Issues
"This means that a lot of companies will be looking at doing an update either to Vista or Windows 7 in the rather narrow window between 2011 and mid-2013. Given that many of these same companies will find the average age of their PC fleet will have grown by 2011, there will be pressure to update a lot more machines as part of a migration during the 2011-2013 period," he said.
Microsoft is certainly not encouraging anyone to wait.
"We recommend they deploy Windows Vista to both take advantage of its benefits and to get their applications ready for Windows 7," said a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement e-mailed to InternetNews.com.
Because Windows 7 will not make significant architectural changes over Windows Vista, using the same kernel and device driver model, Microsoft expects that Windows 7 will run most if not all applications that run on Windows Vista.
"While we know that enterprise customers will want to complete thorough compatibility testing with any new operating system, the transition to Windows 7 should be much more straightforward if they move to Windows Vista in the interim," the company concluded.
Shim believes there will be some corporate buying for Windows 7, and they won't wait for the first service pack to be released, which is usually what happens. In the past, businesses would test a new OS, but not distribute it until the first service pack came out, usually one year after the OS is released.
"The short time frame between Vista and Windows 7 has given commercial buyers a reason to hold off," he said. "That as well as the economy, and we haven't seen a refresh cycle in a while. My feeling is adoption for Windows 7 will be pretty quick, because a lot of what they tried to accomplish with Vista will be in 7."
