AlCook

December 14, 2009 at 10:33am

This article should keep its causes and effects in line. You can't say that Win 7 is driving more spending and then say "pent up demand for new servers and PCs" is doing it. If Win7 were driving it, it would rise even if overall demand were not increasing.

You also need to examine the facts more carefully. I fully believe that 94% of companies will upgrade to Windows 7, but the question is whether they are going to upgrade the OS on older machines, which is a rare occurence in corporate IT, or whether they will bring Windows 7 into their environment when they buy new PCs.

Every customer I have talked to is doing the latter. So they count as Win7 adopters, but they're not specifying Win7 as the only OS they use. In fact, it will be on the minority of their machines for several years yet, as they slowly replace XP and Vista machines. "Pent up demand" could accelerate that somewhat, but Win7 can't take a lot of credit for generating that demand. It's due more to cutbacks in 09 and delayed PC replacements than the OS.

Al