Why enterprises will embrace Windows 7

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 19:09

Business IT - Technology

I've just finished reading an article about how Windows 7 will be panned by enterprises which are now supposedly skeptical about Windows because of their bad experience with Vista. What's more, many of these enterprises will supposedly be moving to desktop Linux. Hogwash.

Before we go any further, let's dispel a myth. As a Vista user, I can say that contrary to many reports it's a pretty good operating system. But as everybody knows it's a resource hog.

Microsoft's big mistake was believing Moore's Law and the Wintel alliance were the sole determinants of the future of desktop computing. Microsoft didn't foresee the drive to power conservation, the drive to downsize to notebooks and the advent of netbooks.

The world didn't want a bloated memory hog that consumed more memory and needed a power hungry processor. All of a sudden, the trend was in the opposite direction.

So enterprises are putting notebooks on desktops and along come netbooks. Microsoft is caught with its pants down and is forced to resurrect Windows XP while it works to deliver a more suitable next generation operating system for its time.

Enter Windows 7. As Steve Ballmer said quite frankly in a public forum Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. It's compact, fast and runs smoothly on minimal hardware configurations.

I have an early Windows 7 beta running nicely on my Asus Eee PC 1000HD with just 1GB of memory and a Celeron processor.

So in an article I read that a recent survey of enterprise users revealed that 84% have no plans to deploy Windows 7 in the next year. Wow!

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