Windows 7? Not this year.

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches worries about Windows 7 deployment plans—but is everything quite as it seems? Not to mention a second-hand Elite gag...

Shane O'Neill reports doom and gloom for Redmond:

A report released today about IT managers' Windows 7 upgrade plans reveals that a large majority of IT staff do not intend to upgrade existing Windows machines to Windows 7 in the next year ... Though this is only one survey and only covers 1,000 or so users, it is still likely to be disheartening news for Microsoft that 84 percent of the respondents do not plan to upgrade ... This kind of hesitation in the enterprise IT ranks could cause delays in the software giant's strategy to get users off the eight-year-old Windows XP and the embattled Windows Vista.
...
Survey results indicate that Windows 7 will suffer for the sins of Vista ... [plus] software compatibility, cost of implementation and the economic downturn ... XP's age does not seem to bother respondents ... The number of IT professionals who are considering moving from Windows to alternatives such as Mac OS and Linux is on the rise.

Eric Krangel clucks that the sky is falling:

Big business ... overwhelmingly skipped Microsoft's Windows Vista, with 71% of all big corporations still chugging along on the aging but functional Windows XP more than two years after Vista launched. Will they rush to Microsoft's next OS, Windows 7? That's looking unlikely.
...
It's hard to say what else Microsoft can do to juice corporate interest in 7. (We'd love to hear your ideas.) But the company needs to get cracking: Together with MS Office, Windows is one of the pillars of Microsoft's business. In Microsoft's most recent quarter, Windows accounted for more than 40% of the company's operating income.

Dennis Sellers breathlessly waves the Mac fanboi flag:

In what is obviously a great opportunity for Apple and Mac OS X, new data ... indicates that only a small percentage of businesses plan to migrate to Windows 7 in its first year of availability.

je ne sais quoi doesn't know:

What happens now? We have a huge entrenched monopoly operating system that nobody really wants to give up, do we just keep buying new computers and put old software on it? Do businesses end up like the aircraft traffic controllers with software 20 years and more out of date just because that's what works?

For myself, since I'm a dual rabid apple and linux fanboy, I certainly don't mind reading about how MS can't get people to buy their new product, but I don't see how this situation really helps apple or linux either ... If they're worried about software compatibility migrating to vista, what makes anyone think they'll pick a non-windows OS? More likely they'll just keep putting band-aids on old systems.

But Preston Gralla is as contrary as ever:

Sounds scary for Microsoft, doesn't it? There's only one problem: That's not what the survey found ... A close reading of the survey shows ... that enterprises may adopt the new operating system more quickly than people expect.
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[It] should surprise no one, given that Windows 7 hasn't even shipped yet, and ... given the uncertainty of a ship date, it's no surprise that IT folks aren't willing to commit to adopting it within a year of when they're asked the question ... The report also shows ... 59% of enterprises adopting Windows 7 by early 2011. That's actually pretty impressive.

And Norsefire smells a dubious survey:

Might have something to do with these surveys being carried out on a submission basis, where the only people who respond are a minority that are either passionate "must-have-the-latest-version" fanatics or passionate "anything-other-than-XP-sucks" fanatics. The apathetic majority isn't taken into account.

Meanwhile, Saint Stephen thinks it's time for a colorful metaphor:

Mainstream support for XP ended last week. It's dead, Jim.
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It's had a nice life. Shoot it in the head, and move on.

And finally...

• Second-hand Elite gag

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Twitter reels from Mikeyy's XSS 'sploits
• Conficker botnet wakes up and smells the coffee
• Hostile hackers threaten power grid
• ...more

Buffer overflow:

• Shark Bait: How not to make your network "safe
• Emergent Chaos: Security is about outcomes, not about process
• Educated Guesswork: Software performance homeostasis
• Joe Wilcox: Will Enterprises Rush to Windows 7?
• Paul McNamara: Fact-checking the fact-checkers: Snopes.com gets an 'A'
• Martha Heller: New CIOs at Aerojet, Novartis, UnitedHealth, and more
• Gordon Haff: BSA equates software pirates to Somali pirates
• ...more

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.