IT survey: Not quite ready for Windows 7

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

Windows Vista is much-improved and the early word on Windows 7, Microsoft’s next computer operating system, is encouraging. Still, the company faces an uphill battle to get corporate users to move from its older operating system, XP to Windows 7, due out next year, according to a recent survey of more than 1,100 information technology professionals.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

More than four-fifths — 84 percent — said they don’t plan to upgrade to Windows 7 when it is released. And Vista? Forget about it (Microsoft’s trying to) — 83 percent said they plan to skip Vista altogether and go directly to Windows 7 when they finally do make a change, according to Dimensional Research, which conducted the study in March.

“What is surprising is because there’s been so much positive news about Windows 7, I thought that might translate into a more open approach to migrating to it,” said Diane Hagglund, senior research analyst for Dimensional Research.

“But there’s a perception among the survey participants that Windows 7 is just another release of Windows Vista,” she said. “They think about it the same way and they’re concerned about it.”

It’s no secret that Windows 7 is being built using the code, or foundation, of Vista, which was released in early 2007. That first year was a bad one for users and for Microsoft. Vista was a memory hog, had snail-like performance and a shortage of software drivers.

Vista’s Service Pack 1, a grab-bag of fixes, came out in February 2008, and brought with it improvements that made Vista more efficient, especially for users who had newer computers with more processing oompah and memory.

Vista’s Service Pack 2 is being tested and due for release in the second quarter, according to Microsoft. Also being tested now is Windows 7, which is earning good marks so far.

Still, the Vista taint remains, and separating it from Windows 7 remains a challenge for Microsoft, which has seen its share of the operating system market decrease since Vista was launched.

In April 2007, two months after Vista became available, Windows had 93.18 percent of the OS market; as of last month, it was 88.14 percent, according to Net Applications, which tracks operating system and Web data.

XP stronghold remains
Windows XP, which came out in 2001,  retains its stronghold among Windows users, with 63 percent of users hanging onto XP two years after Vista’s release, and only 23 percent having switched to Vista, says Net Applications. The remaining percentage is divided among other versions of Windows (including Windows 98, 2000 and Millennium Edition, the latter being perhaps the worst OS ever created).

April 14 marked the end of free, technical “mainstream” Microsoft support for XP users, although “extended support” — on a per-charge basis — remains until April 2014, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.

And, “the company will continue to provide security patches at no additional charge, automatically delivered monthly via Windows Update,” she said.

Microsoft understands that many users, home and business, will opt to go from XP to Windows 7, skipping Windows Vista entirely. One firm, StatCounter, which measures Web site traffic, noted last month that while Vista is "gaining some consistent traction in the United States" among home users, data shows that there is "still resistance to Vista in the business market."

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