50% of Businesses Will Deploy Windows 7 First Year, Survey

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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A survey of 1200 companies found that fully half of them plan on deploying Windows 7 in the first year of release. The article indicates that this is an indicator that many businesses avoided Vista upon release but are ready to move off XP. Are our IT Admin/CIO readers planning to go Windows 7 right away?

"Overall, the mood based on the survey comments, is generally positive," DiDio wrote in the summary. "However, some corporate customers did voice healthy skepticism on issues ranging from application compatibility to upgrade pricing for the commercial and business editions of Windows 7. It will be incumbent on Microsoft to respond quickly and efficiently to any technical issues that arise during the first wave of user deployments"
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Just this last Thursday we opened a project to migrate to Windows 7 at the company I work at. This will be a pretty large deployment as well. We will be deploying Windows 7 to almost 5000 workstations.

We don't have a time-table in place yet, but the CIO wants this done as fast as possible.

However, one of the reasons for this is that we get all of our workstations from HP and we are hearing that they are going to stop offering Vista to XP downgrade licenses early next year.

So while yes, everyone on the project is in agreement that Windows 7 is far superior to XP, we are having our hand forced a bit.
 
We only have around 100 workstations, all running XP with the exception of 3 of our newest machines which are running Vista. I don't see the point of moving any of them to Windows 7. All of our users are happy and productive with their systems. Any new systems we get, we will go with Windows 7 though.
 
Yeah Windows 7! It's a great OS and I'm very glad that the IT industry isn't sitting on the sidelines again.
 
i like using windows 7... not that noticibly different from Vista tho... as long as im not running XP i dont really care.. i too used to the Vista/7 search function on the start bar and other features..
 
I can see it happening; though in my workplace it's more due to XP's age and diminishing availability than anything else. We'll have to migrate eventually.
 
My 150 user network is going to 7 as well. we are going to do it system by system due to present economic situations ordering a 150 pc's and the high level software to go with them cant be done so we are going with a 5 a week and 10 on holiday weeks schedule . The marketing department already has pc's on the way here on the 22nd with nice i7s 12 gigs of ram and CS4 upgrades. The rest of the network is not going to start moving over till after the 1st we still have a few server 2003 boxes that are being replaced as part of this as well.
 
I can tell you my company has no plans yet to move to a new OS.
 
JUSTJOEL73 said:
Frankly I don't really see them hitting 50%. 30% might be more realistic.
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I don't see them doing even that, why would you take a perfectly viable os and go through all the headache of upgrading? I would be very surprised to see people do this, more like when they are forced to upgrade their machines it will have it.

now for the personal user, well I have already pre ordered 3 copies :D
 
protias said:
I can tell you my company has no plans yet to move to a new OS.
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Wow. When did they upgrade from Windows 3.11?

I don't see why organizations are going to stick with XP. Yes, it works great, but there are a lot of issues with it that are resolved with Vista/7.

I don't see using Windows XP (when did it come out? 2001?). I don't see a lot of problems with it, but it's using 8 year old technology. It's ancient in terms of the industry.

Of course, people are still using AS400's and green screen terminals in a lot of places....

Yes, I'm a MS Whore.
 
BS, companies will upgrade when they buy new workstations. If it ain't broke don't fix it, especially in a recession. There is no justification for a new OS just because it is new.
 
I'm just really hoping companies finally get off IE6. I doubt those companies still using IE6 are among the 50% planning to move in the first year though.
 
I think it all depends on the software licening, compatibility with the applications used, the support services you rely on, and hardware (in place or possible upgrade)

The last part of the situation is cost.

If you can tie all those together and not drive up software costs, maybe you might roll out windows 7 for your company in 2010.
 
StormUP said:
I'm just really hoping companies finally get off IE6. I doubt those companies still using IE6 are among the 50% planning to move in the first year though.
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I can tell you at the place I am interning, there are thousands of employees who still run XP, and IE6. Everyone here complains that they have to work on a 6 year+ computer and the company expects them to be more productive with less.
 
We definitely plan to skip Vista and go straight to Windows 7. However, we are a rather small business, and simply cannot afford the licensing right now. Additionally, we will have to upgrade some other expensive software as well (one of which is Adobe Acrobat) to versions compatible with Windows 7 if we move.
 
caniba said:
BS, companies will upgrade when they buy new workstations. If it ain't broke don't fix it, especially in a recession. There is no justification for a new OS just because it is new.
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Not true tbh, small companies will do it like that but you tend to do it wholesale on larger scale systems as it's not worth the hassle maintaining multiple environments.

Then again the way this is worded makes it sound like 50% of companies will start rolling it out, not replace wholesale and with something like 98% of businesses being classed as SME's I guess it fits.

My company is doing it pretty quick though, our XP build was shit (yay outsourcing) and some apps don't work on Vista (yay SAP) but work fine in Windows 7's XP Mode.

So that'll be about 50,000 machines within a year I think.
 
caniba said:
BS, companies will upgrade when they buy new workstations. If it ain't broke don't fix it, especially in a recession. There is no justification for a new OS just because it is new.
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False.

Most of the huge companies have software assurance, volume licensing, etc., which means they pay nothing for the OS. And similarly, these companies also have deployment infrastructures set up that will 100% automate the install process. It takes very little man power and money to install new software in a properly set-up enterprise network. A new OS that saves hardware costs and increases productivity is an easy and cheap way to save money.
 
^^ bingo, better security, new features and so on, plenty of reasons to go with a new OS, we have mostly XP rigs at work, i want more secure core OS's on my network, and i want ones that can use features of the 2008 Domain controllers and other server 2008 features.
 
InorganicMatter said:
False.

Most of the huge companies have software assurance, volume licensing, etc., which means they pay nothing for the OS. And similarly, these companies also have deployment infrastructures set up that will 100% automate the install process. It takes very little man power and money to install new software in a properly set-up enterprise network. A new OS that saves hardware costs and increases productivity is an easy and cheap way to save money.
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Bingo. I work at a school and we have volume licensing. The hardest part is creating the master image for everyone. After that is completed, it takes 1 day to upgrade all of our labs; and 1 week to roll out the images to all the staff and faculty. This is 1 person doing 250 laptops and desktops. We don't even have the really nice imaging software, we still use ghost...
 
We set up a test box at work to see if W7 would play nice with some of our shop management stuff, it does not sadly as both PeachTree and E2 are 16 bit software packages.
 
I'm senior system analyst in my company and I have gone through testing and certifying our internal software works with different OS's for many years and always the decision to migrate bowls down to support.

Our PC's and Laptops are provided by HP and if they say they will not longer support XP then we will have to migrate whether we like it or not.
 
migsutu said:
We only have around 100 workstations, all running XP with the exception of 3 of our newest machines which are running Vista. I don't see the point of moving any of them to Windows 7. All of our users are happy and productive with their systems. Any new systems we get, we will go with Windows 7 though.
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I'm surprised at how quickly this survey indicates businesses will move, but one good reason to do so is that mainstream support for XP ends in June of 2010. I personally hope that it happens sooner, rather than later. I'm scheduled for a new PC, and I'd much rather move to 7 than another XP machine.

Time will tell what we do.
 
Nanan said:
We set up a test box at work to see if W7 would play nice with some of our shop management stuff, it does not sadly as both PeachTree and E2 are 16 bit software packages.
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Did you try them with XP running on Virtual PC? Assuming you're running 7 Pro or Enterprise/Ultimate, it free and fairly well integrated into the desktop.
 
I still think this is going to fail. Most people are totally desensitized/clueless about their operating system. When it comes to computers, they don't think of Windows, Mac OS, or Linux - they think of Dell, Apple, and HP. I don't think people will even pay attention to them trying put identity on the software instead of hardware.
 
Cool, bros. Enjoy your Windows Sevens. Meanwhile, we'll be doing pacman -Syu and apt-get update; apt-get upgrade on our Arch and Debian machines, respectively. This is very effective.
 
Nanan said:
We set up a test box at work to see if W7 would play nice with some of our shop management stuff, it does not sadly as both PeachTree and E2 are 16 bit software packages.
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I can't tell you how happy it would make me if PeachTree had never been created :p

The newest version works with Win7, but it costs more than Windows 7 does..
 
I can say that the college I work for is preparing Windows 7 deployments for the Spring semester. We've been testing software compatibilities for a while now.
 
I work for a university and just in my part of it we have about 5k machines. We have machines from 933mhz PIII's with 128mb of ram to new dell 760's. We cant deploy office 2007 since not all machines can run it without bringing their PC to a complete stand still. Our network is made up of T1 backbones so we cant even push out windows updates without killing the network. (anywhere from 30-250 pc's on each T1, and counting redunacny we have around 200 T1's I imagine)

Windows 7 may happen for us. but we are at least 2-3 years (at the soonest) from being rid of our 128mb ram machines, so maybe about 4 years from now we can look at a Win7 rollout. (not joking)

FYI we didnt roll out XP until 2005.
 
Well, since my company produces a lot of enterprise IT management software, I don't expect we'll be upgrading en masse until most of our customers do. I'll be happy to be wrong, though.
 
MrValentine said:
I work for a university and just in my part of it we have about 5k machines. We have machines from 933mhz PIII's with 128mb of ram to new dell 760's. We cant deploy office 2007 since not all machines can run it without bringing their PC to a complete stand still. Our network is made up of T1 backbones so we cant even push out windows updates without killing the network. (anywhere from 30-250 pc's on each T1, and counting redunacny we have around 200 T1's I imagine)

Windows 7 may happen for us. but we are at least 2-3 years (at the soonest) from being rid of our 128mb ram machines, so maybe about 4 years from now we can look at a Win7 rollout. (not joking)

FYI we didnt roll out XP until 2005.
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Holy shit! The last time I had that little ram, I had a Celeron 300 (OCed to 450, of course).

I think I had 384mb on my Athlon 1800+ (probably 768mb or 1GB by the time I moved to an Athlon 64). I would not want to use those machines for a desktop....though they're probably be okay for word or small spreadsheets. Hell, I find the Athlon 1800 with 512mb unbearably slow with XP (not that I use it for much other than looking for old programs/files that only exist on that machine.
 
I'm not sure if eveyone noticed, but he did say within the first Year(12months) of release. I'm sure that with XP support stoping in 9months, most will have to one way or another if not for security reasons alone.
 
Omegas said:
I'm not sure if eveyone noticed, but he did say within the first Year(12months) of release. I'm sure that with XP support stoping in 9months, most will have to one way or another if not for security reasons alone.
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Sure, but skipping Vista for the latest release would be historical (hysterical?). My last company was on 2000 for years--well after XP released a couple of service packs.
 
MrValentine said:
I work for a university and just in my part of it we have about 5k machines. We have machines from 933mhz PIII's with 128mb of ram to new dell 760's. We cant deploy office 2007 since not all machines can run it without bringing their PC to a complete stand still. Our network is made up of T1 backbones so we cant even push out windows updates without killing the network. (anywhere from 30-250 pc's on each T1, and counting redunacny we have around 200 T1's I imagine)

Windows 7 may happen for us. but we are at least 2-3 years (at the soonest) from being rid of our 128mb ram machines, so maybe about 4 years from now we can look at a Win7 rollout. (not joking)

FYI we didnt roll out XP until 2005.
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This is reality for most companies. Where I work is just like this. For those of you that will be rolling out Win7 with hardware that can run it. Please come and work for my company and convince the management that PIII and P4's are no longer productive.
 
srangara said:
Sure, but skipping Vista for the latest release would be historical (hysterical?). My last company was on 2000 for years--well after XP released a couple of service packs.
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What you're saying is definitely true. But that's exactly why this isn't unusual. XP SP2 was, in fact, MS's next OS, which they decided to give away fro free to close down many security issues.

The fact that it seamlessly runs 16bit apps in an XP virtual machine also makes the decision a no brainer for those companies that are still running them.

Bottom line is this isn't without precedence(nt?). I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't examples in the transition from Win 3.x to 9x and/or NT.
 
Sysadmin for 250 users.

Not rolling out. Mostly because we have lots of PC hardware that doesn't technically meet the requirements, and we're running on an NT4 domain. (Upgrading that to 2008 has a higher rank on the food chain right now).
 
We've been testing Windows 7 since the betas at our place and we thought at first to stick with xp for a bit longer, but after the RC, we changed our minds.

We actually saw good performance and compatibility on most of our current systems. The lowest end system we tested was a 1.6Ghz P4 with 512MB ram and it actually felt more responsive than XP did.
Software still ran close to the same speed as they did on XP, but the interface never felt unresponsive.

Only 1 of our programs refused to instal at all in Windows 7, but it also failed to do so in vista which is the main reason we never deployed vista. But Windows 7 XP Mode took care of that.

So we're now deploying Windows 7 on all our new PCs and on all pcs requiring repairs.
Coming november, most if not all of our 1700 PCs will be Windows 7.
 
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