My first reaction, on seeing headlines such as "84% will not upgrade to Windows 7 in the next year" or "83% of Businesses Won't Bother with Windows 7" (what happened to that other one percent? Presumably they will upgrade but not in the next year, eh?) is to read them as "Apple and Linux fanbois misinterpret shady polling data to their own benefit again." This is particularly the case over at Slashdot, god bless their heretical open-source hearts, but at least their bias is worn on their sleeves. When you see the Information Week article on which that Slashdot story was based, though, despite the inclusion of the qualifying "Next Year" you have to wonder why this was deemed news? What CIO or corporate IT manager in his right mind deploys any new operating system inside a year of its initial release? Even in the case of 7, which has gotten high marks throughout the beta and RC testing phases, it would be unusual if huge numbers of people were deploying it in the first year, particularly in these economic conditions.

The real news out of the survey is twofold; one, that fully half of respondents indicated that they are considering a switch to a non-Windows operating system and two, that companies which skipped the Vista upgrade cycle have found few if any problems while continuing to run the supposedly outdated and unavailable Windows XP.

My question, then, revisits one that I posed around the time that Vista was released initially: has the badly botched operating system served as a wake-up call to organizations as to their relationship with the Windows platform? Will Vista be regarded as the moment when Microsoft's desktop platform finally jumped the shark? Did it show us all how crazy and outmoded the traditional upgrade cycle has been, even as newer, less costly alternatives have sprung up in the news? Microsoft picked the worst possible time to blow a Windows version release when they did so with Vista, with SaaS alternatives and a newly reinvigorated Apple breathing down their necks. Could we be seeing already the long-term side effects I then predicted?

Time will tell. But it's going to be a doubly hard sell to deploy 7 the longer and more successfully businesses continue to operate on XP and experiment with web-based alternatives which are not operating system dependent.