June 4th, 2008

Windows 7: To wait or not to wait? That is the question

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:44 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Resellers, System builders, Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

With Windows 7 poised to begin private testing any time now and to ship by late 2009, a number of business users are wondering whether they should simply skip Windows Vista all together and wait for 7 instead.

Microsoft, not surprisingly, is advising customers against taking a pass on Vista. As part of a new white paper aimed at influencing business users who are evaluating when and whether to move to Windows Vista, Microsoft is advocating enterprise users should migrate to Vista sooner rather than later.

The white paper — “The Business Value of Windows Vista: Five Reasons to Deploy Now” — doesn’t include a lot of new data; instead, it revisits the business features Microsoft built into Vista and highlights some of the new deployment tools and case-study examples of companies who have migrated to Vista. But it does offer Microsoft’s official guidance on Windows 7 deployments. From the paper:

“There is no need to wait for Windows 7. It is a goal of the Windows 7 release to minimize application compatibility for customers who have deployed Windows Vista since there was considerable kernel and device level innovation in Windows Vista. The Windows 7 release is expected to have only minor changes in these areas. Customers who are still using Windows XP when Windows 7 releases will have a similar application compatibility experience moving to Windows 7 as exists moving to Windows Vista from Windows XP.”

Lee Nicholls, Director of Global Solutions with Getronics — a Microsoft integration partner that sells heavily into the financial services and manufacturing industries — agreed with Microsoft’s compatibility warning.

“There could be even less compatibility between XP and Windows 7,” based on what Microsoft ends up providing in terms of new migration and deployment tools, Nicholls said.

The jump between Windows XP and Windows 7 could be a big one, while the one from Vista to Windows 7 should be fairly minor, Nicholls said. And given that “Windows 7 is going to be a superset of Windows Vista, it’s not really something worth waiting for,” Nicholls added.

In its new white paper, Microsoft also used a timing argument to convince business users to upgrade now:

“Historically, mainstream deployment occurs not when Microsoft releases a product but 18 months later. While the mainstream deployment cycle is beginning for Windows Vista now, it isn’t expected to begin for Windows 7 until at least mid-2011. With Microsoft set to release a new version of Windows every three years, there will always be a new version on the horizon during a typical evaluation period. This means that customers should not base their deployment decisions on the anticipated release-to-market (RTM) date but on an ‘evaluation completion date,’ sometime after RTM and dependent on the customer.”

Microsoft pointed to a recent report by the Gartner Group, entitled “Don’t Skip Windows Vista Entirely,” as further fodder.

“XP goes end-of-life before (Windows) 7 comes out,” partner Nicholls said. (Mainstream support from Microsoft for XP ends in April 2009. Customers who want continued support from Microsoft have to pay for it after that date.)

Getronics is advising customers it won’t be worth spending their entire IT budgets just to pay for extending their support for Windows XP rather than biting the bullet and moving to Vista, he said.

Business users: Are you moving to Vista before Windows 7? Why/why not?