Survey reveals pent-up demand for Windows 7 - and alternatives

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 7:15 am

A survey reveals that 84 percent of IT pros don’t have plans to upgrade to Windows 7 in the next year and half of respondents are considering alternatives, but it pays to parse a few nuances.

Andrew Nusca has the details on the survey, which was conducted by Dimension Research and commissioned by KACE, a systems management appliance company. The survey (Techmeme) had 1,142 respondents and 99 percent of them had Windows installed at their companies.

The spin here is that it’s somehow bad that most IT professionals won’t jump to Windows 7 in the next year. However, Windows 7 is still in beta and hasn’t been released yet. Of course, 84 percent won’t upgrade to Windows 7 in a 12 month time frame. If you go April to April and Windows 7 is launched in October-ish that means IT pros would have just six months to make the leap. In the OS upgrade world that speed just doesn’t happen.

Cast in that light, this chart below looks pretty impressive to me.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16208