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April 14, 2009

Will Windows 7 be panned by enterprise IT?

Randall C. Kennedy mulls over the most recent survey numbers, which show a tepid response from IT shops

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Windows 7 will change the world! It will right the wrongs of Vista in the enterprise space while simultaneously winning over the hearts and minds of consumers and putting Apple in its place once and for all. It truly is the reascendance of Windows as the dominant desktop platform.

Or at least that's how some of my contemporaries have been portraying the slow-motion striptease that is the Windows 7 beta program. With each successive "leaked" build, there has been a corresponding wave of gushing prose, with comments like "blazingly fast" and "so much better than Vista" rolling off the keyboards of amateur beta testers and professional journalists alike.

[ Can your PC run Windows 7? Find out with InfoWorld's free Windows Sentinel performance monitoring tool. | See why InfoWorld's Galen Gruman concludes that moving from Windows XP to desktop Linux would be easier and cheaper for many business than adopting Windows 7. ]

However, if you take a step back and look at the raw data, you'll see that Windows 7 is shaping up to be a lot like Windows Vista, at least in terms of corporate acceptance. For example, a recent survey by systems management tools vendor Kace shows that 84 percent of IT shops have no plans to deploy Windows 7 in the next year.

That number stands in stark contrast against the incessant cheerleading coming from the various media blog-and-pony shows. They would have you believe that the global business community is poised to embrace Windows 7 with open arms. On the contrary, it now seems as if Windows 7 will be greeted with a healthy amount of skepticism, ostensibly due to the not-so-distant Vista debacle.

Even more distressing (to Windows fans, at least) is the number of IT shops that are now seriously considering alternatives to Windows on the desktop. Of the firms surveyed, fully 50 percent say they are evaluating non-Windows options, not a good sign for Microsoft and certainly a fly in the ointment of the hard-core Windows 7 bandwagon crowd.

My advice: Ignore the hype. Perform your own due diligence. As I noted in my "The good, the bad, and the ugly" series, Windows 7 has some good features that deserve a closer look. However, if you do decide to delay your Windows 7 deployment -- whether to maximize your existing XP investment or to give yourself more time to evaluate long-term alternatives -- know that you're in good company.

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10 of 10 comments
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I.Wannabe.Randall.Kennedy 14-Apr-09 8:34am
Let me translate this: "Blah blah blah, I need to rip on Microsoft so people will read me. Blah blah blah, no matter what MS comes out with I am going to say its terrible and no one should use it. Everyone should still be using Windows XP 20 years from now"
RCK.Wannabe 14-Apr-09 9:30am

RCK's integrity and writing seem to degrade with every post he writes. This is essentially his entire blog post:

blahblahblahblah let me write more sensationalist crap so I will get more reader views blahblahblah omgM$ suxorz they're such an evil corporation blahblahblah everybody's gonna dump windows 7 blahblahblah use windows 7 and the terrorists will come to get us all blahblahblah let me contradict myself and just say that windows 7 was made by terrorists!

tomaddox 14-Apr-09 10:01am
Well, the RCK-haters and Windows fanbois are out, I see. The one nit I would pick with this post is that it's perfectly reasonable for IT shops not to be considering deploying Windows 7 in the next year. The release candidate isn't even out yet, and no one knows when the gold release date will actually be. Microsoft's track record dictates that one should not implement any OS until SP1 is released, so wise IT shops will probably not deploy Windows 7 until then, which will probably be a couple years at the earliest. In the meantime, however, there's a good chance that IT shops will consider alternatives such as Mac and Linux. Most of them probably will stick with Windows, but some will undoubtedly shift.
BobcatRidge 14-Apr-09 11:21am
1 reply
What a piece of junk! Rick, you are as bad as the Republicans that refuse to President Obama any credit, even when he does something good like his handling of the Somali pirates. Start being an advocate of what you like and stop being a hater.
JTB2468 15-Apr-09 7:26am
Classic Obama supporter... No matter what the conversation is, Obama, Lord and Messiah, has to be brought into it.
tjkc 14-Apr-09 11:23am
You did not mention that only 17% of the repondents to the survey were looking at the beta. This was the case with Vista too as ilustrated by the Mohave project.
Randall.Kennedy.Or.Die 14-Apr-09 12:07pm
I'm going to post a comment in the true spirit of Randall Kennedy by not even reading the article and complaining about how horrible it is. This article was terrible, especially the part above!
JTB2468 15-Apr-09 7:21am
1 reply
I find it funny how many people seem to read these articles simply so they can complain about them. If you don't like RCK's style...why do you read it? Seriously...there's a whole Internet out there. Personally, I don't see any reason to get Windows 7, or even Vista for that matter. Vista does nothing that I need to do that I can't already do in XP. I have switched my secondary desktop OS from XP to Server 2008 though, because it actually does have some nice things I use. I'm looking forward to Ubuntu 9.04 a lot more than Windows 7.
Neil 16-Apr-09 4:56pm
Spoken like a true Linux devotee
Neil 16-Apr-09 4:52pm
I see infoworld has made it harder to criticize RCK ...no matter. Consider yourself criticized !!! Yet another in a VERY long list of anti Windows 7 articles, You are indeed the only journalist (cough,cough...sorry the word "journalist" stuck in my throat when it was applied to you RCK) to actively and unceasingly say bad things about Windows 7. Sure it's still not ready for release yet, but... it is the best that Microsoft have for a while. For once you have quoted proper facts, but even then figures don't lie but it all depends on the interpretation of them doesn't it? Everyone is fully aware of how SLOW businesses are to adopt new technology, it happens every time something new comes out. For example businesses still use faxes, but what about the quicker (and much easier) emails. The ability to send pictures (in colour) and quickness of reply without the huge telephone bill. 99 % of my work is through emails, but businesses still send me faxes(speak of the devil ones coming through right now). RCK please give up on hounding windows 7, I think that you have made your point quite clear that you are against microsoft and win 7 (mostly because you didn't get "that" invite and you didn't that "free" (which wasn't free at all...they were "loan" only, and you know it) laptop).

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