I work for a blue chip and we won't even bother installing Windows 7 in our labs for at least a year after it goes live never mind rolling it out across the business. I think Microsoft is a victim of its own success in that, compared to Vista, XP has very low system requirements and, in this day and age where IT budgets are being slashed, means businesses can get away with a low cost low spec desktop for 99% of staff. Obviously its not entirely cost driven, compatibility of legacy software, familiarity of the GUI, and general user satisfaction play a big part in a decision to roll out a new Operating System.
Its my prediction that Windows 7 will predominately be a home Operating system for a number of years regardless of how warm its current reception is. I also believe that to conquer the corporate desktop market once again, its proposed cloud Operating System is its best bet. And thus ends my 5 minute break from my 70-291 studies, back to studying. Cheers
James

We're planning on deploying Win7 next year (summer) at our place, by then SP will be out and the initial bugs will have been found

Sounds like a poll coming on

-Ken

Wow really? Maybe our place isn't as cutting edge as I'd thought ha ha although we do have a considerable number of desktops (386,000 employee's) which could be why we aren't following suit but I stand corrected

When I was at IBM (many years ago!) we stuck with Windows 2000 after XP was released. It was only when SP2 was released then the desktops started to get migrated.

Hi Sparky, well done on the promotion by the way, I think when you are a really big company its that much more expensive to upgrade isn't it. It will be interesting to see if users on this forum make the results of Mr Wagner's (congrats to you also Ken) poll come out close to 83% as stated in the article

Cheers mate.

I dont see any of my customers migrating over to Vista so it really depends if it is worth moving to Windows 7 or not. Some of the hardware is starting to get fairly old and can just about handle XP so moving to Windows 7 would be a full desktop refresh.

Definitely not gonna happen in the current climate isn't it. I think there's a good chance though that when the dust has settled Vista could find itself bypassed altogether for Windows 7, if the hype is anything to go by

Yup, I can see many companies skipping Vista but considering a switch to Windows 7. Some of Vista networks I have worked on for one off contracts have had a few problems, for example some of the laptops had 512MB RAM and the users wondered why the laptops were slow.

Yup, but a laptop shipped with Vista and only 512MB of RAM is a joke.

I laughed when I bought my state of the art Sony Vaio Laptop about a year and a half ago, dual core, blue ray the lot and 4GB of memory with Vista Home Premium installed. Can you guess what I'm going to say next? Thats right, I nearly took it back thinking a "tech guy" had robbed a gig out of my machine because stupid Vista Home only recognised 3GB of RAM!!! MS programmers didn't envision anyone having more than 3 GB of RAM when they shipped Vista H P!!!!

Unfortunatley a limit on a 32bit OS. You sould be fine with 3GB unless your running Norton AV or something like that.