Microsoft’s plan to convert those enterprise XP holdouts into new licenses for Windows 7 is to woo the consumer, using its typical tactic of offering free upgrades to Windows 7 to folks who buy Vista computers. That’s not a surprise. The hidden news here is two-fold. One, that Windows 7 is looking ever more likely to ship in 2009 — instead of the original 2010 date that Microsoft has officially bantered about. If that proves true, Microsoft will give away free Windows 7 upgrades to PC buyers until as late as January 31 of 2010, according to Malaysian blog TechARP.com, a blog site that has successfully leaked such information before. Two, Microsoft is hoping to force enterprises to leap from XP to Windows 7 through the pressure of the consumer, who comes to work and demands the same operating system on the work PC as is on the home PC.
According to a story from CIO magazine, in an interview at a New York event Tuesday to mark the extension of Microsoft’s collaboration with EMC, Ballmer began his marketing message for Windows 7. He stressed its faster performance, longer battery life and simplified security settings and warned that enterprises that stick with Windows XP too long hear about it from impatient users who have been using newer computers running Vista and Windows 7 at home.
While enterprise XP holdouts may be nearing their PC refresh cycles, Microsoft’s timing is not the best. Unless the economy stops its death spiral, organizations are not likely going to prioritize a giant desktop upgrade when balancing IT budgets in 2009. Consumers are also feeling more concerned about job security than they are about PC lag time.
Microsoft can still work the timing of Windows 7 to its benefit, if it can ship Windows 7 early enough in 2009 to have its SP1 out and ready in 2010 when the economy (hopefully) begins a rebound. It is not likelty, either, that enterprises will instead try to cut their mission critical applications over to Linux or Macs for a perceived long-term savings. This would be too high of a short-term expense during a time when everyone is simply trying to weather the storm. By 2010, enterprises will feel more confident in upgrading to the by-then well-known entity of Windows 7 in an SP1 version. By then, perhaps Microsoft will even have a clean path for an XP-to-7 upgrade strategy, rather than the nasty, painful one it expects enterprises to endure today.
On the other hand, if enterprises are sitting on thousands of aging PCs that simply must be upgraded in 2009, some pundits predict that enterprises may still skip Windows 7 and roll out desktop virtualization — running XP in virtual machines on newer, faster computers. The same strategy worked in the data center and gives companies the benefit of refreshed hardware at less of a cost than a complete software cutover.
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