After the debacle of the long Vista development cycle and rocky launch, Microsoft must be breathing a sigh of relief over the very positive reception for Windows 7 since a beta version was made available early last month. But it may still be too early to turn the page and move on.
Certainly, a lot of corporate users are starting to weigh whether to skip Vista altogether and move to 7. That much is admitted in a blog post today by Gavriella Schuster, senior director of the Windows product management group. The growing likelihood that 7 will come out in time for this year’s Christmas season – and possibly as early as July, to catch the back-to-school sales – has added to the sense of expectation.
So is it time to give up on Vista?
Not so fast, says Ms Schuster. She points out that corporate users often take 12-18 months to test a new operating system and prepare for the switch, and that in the meantime there is the risk that software written to run on Windows XP will lose maintenance support from its developers. Is that a risk that any IT manager wants to run?
Also, the upgrade from Vista to 7 will be a relatively easy one from a technical point of view, so the investment in adopting Vista at this stage, even with a new operating system close to launch, is not all wasted.
Whatever IT managers decide, it will probably end up having a much bigger impact on the rest of the PC business than on Microsoft itself. Many pay for Microsoft software under multi-year licensing agreements that give them the right to upgrade whenever they choose, so there is no big revenue impact from the timing.
But upgrades are often accompanied by new PC purchases, so if a company decides to put off an operating system upgrade it could also well delay the purchase of new machines. With corporate cutbacks already taking a bite out of the PC business, that would not be good news.
