In October 2008 I dropped a post called Don’t wait for Windows 7. Well during the past days I have changed my mind and I guess many others did as well concerning waiting for Windows 7.
When Windows 7 came up on the horizon last year, we heard statements like “it isn’t expected to begin for Windows 7 until at least mid-2011” also at that time, nobody expected Microsoft to provide a public Beta of Windows 7 that early. So far Microsoft seems to receive a lot of positive feedback, first because they made it look like “Hey guys we know you’re all waiting for it, here it is, Surprise !!!” and secondly because what they gave us seems to be quite stable. But now that they have made us all happy in providing us something we can put our hands on, to me it looks like we are now entering into the second phase of speculations about when Windows 7 will go RTM.
I’m not joining those that are negative about Windows Vista, in my view it’s being “talked” more worse than it really is. But fact is that with a possible release date of Windows 7 already this year, why would one that had planned an OS migration not wait for Windows 7 that now seems to be that close ?
Just before Windows Vista was being released we had of course had the same thoughts like “why not wait and deploy Vista”, the reason then to continue or move to XP was mostly related to hardware requirements and application comparability. The required hardware upgrade investments often couldn’t be justified over the advantages Windows Vista would bring.
Today things are a bit different. All hardware we have bought in the past 2 years will be capable of running Windows 7. I was just told today that Win7 would even run ok on a HP nc8000 that is more than 5 years old now. Related to application compatibility we have all had the time to familiarize ourselves with UAC as well.
I personally think it would be great if Microsoft would be more precise about the current plans, knowing that communicating dates can be a risk and if they aren’t met will raise new speculations, but just based on what we have seen in these days from Windows 7, I am pretty sure that in the next couple of weeks, Microsoft should have a pretty good idea on where they stand with Windows 7.
Should it become realistic that Windows 7 is being released this year, those who do plan an OS migration can start planning now and execute shortly after it has been released and because we are all that positive that this time Microsoft delivers a great OS, we wouldn’t wait for Service Pack 1 to deploy it.