Eye on Microsoft
About this Blog:
This is Shane O'Neill's blog about Microsoft's corporate strategy and its various software and services — the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Windows 7 Adoption Survey Says! Whatever You Want it To Say
All surveys need to be taken with a grain of salt, but after checking out a few professionally conducted and commissioned Windows 7 adoption surveys I can't tell if the impending OS is doomed or ready to take off like a rocket.
Print
My take from recent surveys: Most testers give a "thumbs up" to the Windows 7 beta, but businesses are in no rush to actually deploy the OS and will stay with XP until they are forced to upgrade, possibly at gun point.
That's the story (with my writer's embellishment of course) being framed by the two most recent surveys that the tech media and what ZDNet blogger Ed Bott refers to as the "Internet Echo Chamber" has run with. (Disclaimer: I am not excluding myself as a member of said "echo chamber").
The first survey that led to some splashy headlines was from research firm ChangeWave. It paints a rosy picture of the Windows 7 beta. Of the survey respondents, 44 percent reported being "very satisfied" with the OS. And to bolster Windows 7 satisfaction, ChangeWave emphasized that a similar survey in Feb. 2007 found that just 10 percent of the respondents expressed the same satisfaction with Vista.
Great news for Microsoft — except that the survey consisted of 68 respondents. Not 368. Not even 168. 68.
I think there have been informal polls taken at bars with more people.
The Windows 7 beta has been largely applauded and many testers are excited about it. But give me more than 68!
The ChangeWave survey goes on to ask convoluted and open-ended questions like "Will your company skip a Vista upgrade altogether to wait for Windows 7, or are you going ahead with a Vista rollout?" Turns out 53 percent will skip Vista altogether. But it neglected to ask how many shops are sticking with XP or how long they will wait until deploying Windows 7. Well, at least this part of the survey included more than 68 people — in fact, it included 2,000 IT people, so it gets points for size.
The next survey that exploded into the Internet Echo Chamber (that term is growing on me) tackles enterprise Windows 7 adoption plans, and this time the news for Microsoft ain't so rosy. The study, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by systems management appliance company KACE, surveyed over 1,000 respondents and contained more specific questions about upgrade timeframes.
What resulted from the Dimensional survey was some gloomy headlines about slow Windows 7 adoption, at odds with the ChangeWave research from just a week earlier. Dimensional's research was more warranted though, with a bigger base of respondents (1,142 IT professionals) and more probing questions about upgrade timeframes and concerns about Windows 7.
The gist: A large majority (84 percent) do not plan to upgrade their machines to Windows 7 in the next year. But given that Windows 7 won't actually be released until probably late September, is this really bad news?
The survey has some other data that Microsoft may find off-putting: 72 percent saying they are more concerned about upgrading to Windows 7 than about staying with the outdated XP; only 17 percent of IT organizations are testing the Windows 7 Beta; 50 percent of respondents are considering moving to alternatives such as Mac OS or Linux.
But depending on how you scrutinize the data, there's good news within the all this alleged bad news. In a post yesterday, ZDNet blogger Ed
Previous Post: Love for Windows: The Real Thing or a Marriage of Convenience?Next Post: Windows 7 Challenge: Secure an Insecure Mobile Workforce
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
