Windows 7 underwhelms? I say unfair

“Organisations are underwhelmed by Windows 7 – Unfair I cry!”

Have a read: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2272675/enterprises-underwhelmed

The recent blog post by V3.net kind of surprised me somewhat. So much so that I felt compelled to put pen to paper or at a  least (two) fingers to key board!

Parsing the article, The research firm (Forrester)  indicates that;

The analyst firm said that the operating system has seen "far from overwhelming" take-up and is currently on just 10 per cent of enterprise PCs compared to 75 per cent for Windows XP. 

V3.net state that enterprises have been underwhelmed by Windows 7 and that the adoption rate has not been as expected. In our experience of over 200 Windows 7 pilots and migrations that’s not the case. We have seen a massive increase in global organisations starting to plan their migrations and deploy Windows 7 and IE8 projects which will roll out in 2011.

What these guys are missing is the "iceberg" effect of corporate IT deployments. To get a windows migration completed  you generally need big numbers of  the following;

• days of planning
• days of design
• days testing
• configuration, updates and additions to the enterprise IT system
• days of User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• days of deployment 

  You can read between the lines and add buckets of tears and blood  - but, hey, no need to be dramatic.

Given, the client adoption rates we are seeing and the work/effort/time required to successfully get through a migration process, I think its fair to say that Windows 7 is now starting to take momentum. 

Throughout this year we’ve seen organisations take stock of their application estate, complete the testing and assess the reports and fix  their business critical applications as appropriate. For those who have not been at the coal face, the Windows 7 migration is an iceberg with such an amount of effort, time and resource going on behind the scenes to ensure the migrations are as smooth as possible. 

Rather than underwhelmed, I think that the Windows 7 migration success story is decidedly under-reported.