Looking Ahead to Licensing Windows 7

Companies planning upgrades to Windows 7 can take steps immediately to reduce the total cost of upgrading. Major factors that influence the upgrade path they take include which edition of Windows 7 they want, whether they want to standardize on a single OS edition, and whether they have Software Assurance (SA) upgrade rights on their current client PCs. Their volume licensing plan and the number of desktops in their organization also influence their choices.

More Upgrades Likely

Relatively few corporate customers adopted Windows Vista as their standard desktop, primarily because most of the computers they already owned did not meet Vista’s high hardware requirements. Instead, Vista found its way into the corporate world as older computers were replaced with newer machines designed for the OS. Even then, many organizations downgraded OEM Vista images to Windows XP, an older OS that required no retraining for staff, and on which all or most of their applications ran without further modification. Research from Forrester, for example, found that at the end of 2008, two years after Vista shipped, more than 70% of business computers were still running XP, indicating lower Vista adoption than might be expected given typical PC replacement cycles of four to five years. At that rate, after two years 40% to 50% of business PCs would normally be replaced with a new machine running the latest OS.