Just when your hands were full trying to figure out if and when your company should upgrade to Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, word got out last week that Microsoft is planning to release the next version of Windows, known as Windows 7, in 2010.
Most businesses are planning to roll out Vista in stages, a percentage of computers every year for the next few years. The timeframe for the new version of Windows raises the question: Should you bother to upgrade to Vista at all or would your company be better off jumping to 7 straight from Windows XP? Unfortunately, the Business Technology Blog doesn’t have the answer. But we can tell you that no one else does at this point either.
That’s not to say some pundits and publications aren’t trying. This article in PC World, for example, teases us with the headline “What Will Windows 7 Look Like?” and then quotes a bunch of people who say that they have no idea. Gartner recently put out an advisory, suggesting that companies would face challenges if they didn’t upgrade to Vista before upgrading to Windows 7, but the reason was that Vista was delayed so often that it is foolish to count on Windows 7 being released on time.
The Business Technology Blog tried unsuccessfully to get a Microsoft spokesperson to tell us everything there was to know about Windows 7. (The spokesperson clarified that while the conventional wisdom is that Windows 7 will be released in 2010, the company has never announced a target release date, and had no other comment.) But even if we had learned all the intended features, this blog would have taken the information with a huge grain of salt. Talking about an operating system and building one are two very different things. For example, Microsoft mentioned often that a new technology for storing data on a computer called “Win FS” was going to be one of the pillars of Vista. But it never materialized and Vista stores data the same way as earlier versions of Windows.