InsideTech

News >> Browse Articles >> Business

News >> Browse Articles >> Microsoft

News >> Browse Articles >> Software

Survey: Two-thirds of Businesses Still Not WIlling To Buy Windows 7

Featured Author:

DailyTech

DailyTech is a leading online magazine for a well-educated, tech audience. Its readers enjoy hard-hitting and up to the minute CE, PC, IT and information technology news. DailyTech’s fast-moving content also reaches out via news syndications, public portals, and forums.

More articles from this author:

• Large Hadron Collider Ready to Restart
• Google Chrome OS Unveiled, Signals Web Applications as Future of Computing
• T-Mobile Employees Sold Customer Data to Rivals

In the consumer sector Windows 7 looks set for success.  With fast-paced pre-order sales in the U.S. wrapped up, the OS looks to storm onto desktops and laptops everywhere this fall (October 22, to be precise). 

In the business sector, though, the usual reluctance to adopt a new Windows operating system is still in full effect.  A study earlier this year showed that 83 percent of business administrators planned not to adopt Windows 7 within the first year of release.  Now a new, larger study offers new predictions for Windows 7’s fate on the business market.

Conducted by Scriptlogic, the study received responses from approximately 20,000 IT administrators at over 1,000 major companies.  The study shows that the numbers have actually improved for Microsoft — 34 percent of companies plan on adopting Windows 7 by the end of 2010, up from the 17 percent in the previous study, which looked at adoption through the end of October 2010 (a two month difference).

However, there’s also the bad for Microsoft — only 5.4 percent of companies plan to adopt the OS this year.  Furthermore, 59.4 percent of the administrators stated that their company had no plans to adopt Windows 7. 

The economy is the biggest factor slowing adoption, with 42.7 percent citing time and resources as a reason not to deploy.  The next biggest factors are application compatibility (39.1%), OS deployment (8.4%), hardware support (7.5%) and migrating user settings (2.2%).

AMD and Intel are also reporting declines in sales, a trend echoed in the survey, which found 33.6 percent of the admins reported data centers were adversely affected by cost cutting, and 30.7 percent reported desktop purchases adversely affected.  Of the IT departments, 34.8 said that delaying hardware purchases was their main source of cost savings, 29.2 percent had turned to virtualization to cut costs, 20.6 had cut staff or delayed hiring, and 14.5 percent have said their budgets have been put in stasis.

All of this makes for an interesting atmosphere for Windows 7 — business interest seems to be piqued and growing, but there seems to be a sharp divide between those who are willing to switch to the new OS and those that currently are making no plans to.  Given sufficient economic recovery, though, this still may be good news for Microsoft as much of the reticent two-thirds might come around with sufficient funding.

© 2009, DailyTech