IT professionals have simply ignored Vista. Windows 7 could now change everything.

I was thinking the other day about Windows 7.  It was only released in the back end of October, however, with Vista being such a flop, it dawned on me that Windows 7 will, by virtue, be the biggest change in business user experience since 2001. That’s almost a decade. You may dismiss this and believe that Vista bridges the gap between XP and Windows 7 and this isn’t really big news, but it doesn’t and it is big news.

Think about it. Although new domestic PC sales have pushed Vista as the “number one” OS and ditched XP, most business IT professionals have refused to deploy Vista. An ideology so stubborn that it has caused Dell Commercial to continue selling XP Professional, alongside Vista to this day. In the history of Microsoft, this has never happened before. Also, the statistics for operating system market share state that XP peaked at 76.1% in 2007. That’s 76.1 percent of the world’s computers running Windows XP. In 2008 this market share is said to have grown to over 80%. This is telling, especially considering it’s two years into Vista’s release, and I bet this percentage is even greater when you consider just commercial networks on their own.

I was chatting with my colleague and we recall commissioning just one Vista machine since its release in 2006. And guess what? This was by accident! (We messed up the order with Dell). Adding insult to injury, we refused to join it to the domain and booted it straight into a terminal server window, providing a 2003 style user-experience. XP is just so much nicer for the “domain experience”.

So although you may have been using Vista at home for some time, don’t forget that at work your PC is more than likely XP Professional. And, as first reviews of Windows 7 are extremely positive and the door has finally closed on the Vista debacle. Techies all over the world are lifting their noses out of their Cisco manuals and evangelizing Windows 7. As XP completely bypassed Vista in the commercial world. A huge change is definitely upon us.