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"For the average business user, there isn't a huge benefit to moving to Windows 7 at this time," Brasen explains. "But Microsoft won't support XP forever and businesses ultimately will be forced to go to Windows 7 so the process should be well planned."

While there is some truth to this statement, it's unlikely that XP will become unsupported anytime in the next seven years. Windows 2000 Pro is still supported (though that ends next year). That's a 10 year support cycle.

Given that, and the expenses of rolling out a new OS throughout a company, the economically prudent thing to do would be to integrate Windows 7 into the current framework on a replacement basis rather than as part of an overall upgrade project until the economic tipping point has been reached. That tipping point would be once Windows 7 has more maturity as an OS, more acceptance, more support and the same familiarity as those operating systems that are out there now. At that point, it may be more economical to finish upgrading degraded or under-performing systems rather than waiting for them to wear out. But there's no point to incurring the expenses of an upgrade until it's actually needed or becomes more economically viable than the status quo.

Linux has come a long way and of course it's free. OpenOffice is a stellar program and its free. Firefox/Chrome/Opera are great browsers and they are free. Need I go on? Hard times sometimes can force people to change their habits. I encourage you to consider your options.

jamesvtm,

People will work with what they have when doing upgrades,etc.

When "times are tought" I doubt that companies will want to spend the $$$ and time to convert to a brand new system if the current one that they are using works.

Here is another article "bashing" Windows on PC World.

Any company using ANY operating system will think twice about upgrading and updating if they nto have to spend the time and $$$ to do it.

This applies to ALL. Apple, Linux and Windows.

Why is it that there are more sories that are negative in some form or other than on other os's?

Whether we like it or not, we all should all adapt the changes that will be brought by the time. It's not that we really have a choice. Get updated or being falling behind.

Nothing wrong with change. But lots of companies never seem to get the hint that they will/should upgrade when needed to. But they keep plugging away with older technology and software.

They seem to never figure out that computer equipment gets more advanced and does more cheaper as the years go on.

they not have to upgrade every year. But should at least do some every couple of years. but they are too busy paying their ceo's all the $$.

PCMan4ever, on 28 October 2009 - 07:49 AM, said:

our company ca 100 employees runs on XP. We recently upgraded to Office 2007. One of the reasons was that we do not have a CRM solution annd Outlook 2007 has a business contact mgr. I would prefer to use a real CRM solution. It was not my call. IT considered an upgrade to Vista but deferred the decision. We run a mixture of HW (incl. old Notebooks, PC's etc.). Likely Win7 will require that we jettison these. So an upgrade is going to cost HW$, SW$, ManHRs. In hard times (as now) the likely action will be to preserve cash at all cost.

However if I was starting with a clean slate, or had a need to upgrade (for some reason) I think Linux should be on the table and be given serious consideration - there will be a learning curve cost that may well be higher than the HW & SW $ for MS SW/OS, but over time it may well be the right choice.