Windows 7: Time to Upgrade?

Microsoft’s Release Candidate for Windows 7 is now available.  Is it time for corporate America to upgrade the thousands of PC’s within their companies?  Most of the larger companies I know chose not to upgrade to Vista.  The Vista OS simply was too problematic and did not have enough enhancements to make the upgrade worthwhile.  Besides, it took us 18 months to complete the Windows XP upgrade not long before.  Is Windows 7 different?  From what I have seen and read, the OS does seem to have fixed the obvious issues that Vista had.  Keep in mind that what everyone is testing is not Gold code yet, but it is pretty solid, which is a very good sign.  Any large organization that has an enterprise agreement with Microsoft probably has already paid for the licensing, but the impact of an upgrade is disruptive at the least.  Windows 7 has basically the same interface that Vista had, so there is a learning curve for employees, unless of course you assume that most employees have home computers, most of them running Vista by now.  If you make this assumption, then employee training is not a huge issue.  Companies could choose to run a mixed environment and just put Windows 7 on any new PC.  This model would allow a slow transition, of course we don’t know what compatibility issues may be introduced and your support teams would have to support and test everything on two operating systems.  I have a feeling that most companies will bite the bullet and upgrade, if for no other reason than to take advantage of the security improvements in Windows 7.  Only time will tell, but this could be a spotlight moment for Microsoft.

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