Beware of Windows 7 Downgrade/Upgrade Mess – The Mountain and the Mole Hill

As Blogged by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet – June 17, 2009

According to Gartner analyst Michael Silver, businesses looking to migrate to Windows 7 could find the whole process much harder and more expensive than it needs to be … thanks to Microsoft.

Here’s what Silver had to say to Infoworld:

“Under Microsoft’s planned enterprise licensing rules, businesses that buy PCs before April 23, 2010, with Windows 7 pre-installed can downgrade them to Windows XP, then later upgrade them to Windows 7 when they’re ready to migrate their users. But PCs bought on or after April 23 can only be downgraded to Vista - which is of no help for XP-based organizations, Silver notes - and could cause major headaches and add more costs to the Windows 7 migration effort.”

My $0.02

One could adopt the Chicken Little behavior of Messrs Kingsley-Hughes and Silver, or one could take a closer look at enterprise R&D, provisioning, packaging, and roll-out to see that enterprises have been preparing for a transition away from XP for much longer than the last 24 hours. Even for those enterprises not transitioning from XP to Vista, plans were underway a long time ago to move to Windows 7.

A large, 25,000+ user enterprise, which shall remain nameless, has been in the process for the past 3 years of auditing all internal systems and evaluating all new initiatives to be Vista compliant; for over a year, they have been regression testing Vista compatibility for Windows 7. They had planned to roll-out Vista later this year, but will instead wait and roll-out Windows 7 the 3rd quarter of next year. Which, interestingly enough, seems to fit right in with purchasing new PCs by the April 23, 2010 deadline.

Unless enterprises are waiting for the retail release of Windows 7 before doing any planning, I think Messrs Kingsley-Hughes and Silver are making a mountain out of a mole hill…or else, enterprises are looking for a Microsoft bail-out (can you say “AIG”).

Copyright 2009 Agave Anejo     Stay on Top of Windows 7 at the Windows 7 QnA Site

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