But what is happening in the corporate environment? Well, this aren’t looking so gloomy there… InformationWeek is reporting that a staggering 83% of businesses will not upgrade to Windows 7 next year. So what is happening there?

Well of course our Redmond friends are still suffering from a big PR problem surrounding Vista. With this OS being plagued with so many problems and incompatibility, it’s only natural the corporate world is not very enthusiastic about it. While Windows 7 looks promising from an end-user point of view, IT professionals say that most of the important functionality needed for a successful deploy-scenario are still missing. One of the key ingredients here is the fact that you can’t really upgrade from XP to 7. A clean install seems necessary. Also since 7 shares the code-base of Vista, many of the compatibility problems will remain, and companies just can’t afford any major downtime in the current economical climate, at least not because of a Windows upgrade…

While XP still holds a lot of popularity, it’s death is getting very near as well. Mainstream support is ending today (Tuesday), and many businesses that won’t make the leap to 7 immediately risk of getting trapped in a no-service period spanning the duration of their waiting. Additionally, the 9 year old OS is getting out-dated, with little to no support for current hardware advances that are being sold for a couple of years now (hello!? multi-threading support?!)

Microsoft definitely needs to step it up a notch, fixing both their shattered reputation and the remaining technical issues responsible for the upgrade hold-offs.

Meanwhile, the Redmond company is almost begging hardware vendors to not make the same mistake as happened with Vista. When Vista first came out, finding good drivers for it was hell. One of the most important reasons for this was of course that at the time, Microsoft decide to use a completely new driver model, forcing the vendors in writing drivers for Vista from scratch.

While this is not the case for Windows 7, as it continues to build on the Vista model,  drivers that were built for Vista should work with 7 as well after some minor changes. This is definitely an advantage and will ensure that this new version is not badly perceived from the start (well, concerning drivers at least ).

On the other hand, there probably won’t be that much time for private testing. As said above, a public beta is to come out beginning 2009, and Microsoft is already hinting on an official release later that year. Of course nothing official yet (as usual from the Redmond boys).  Because of this, M$ is urging the HW-vendors to already start testing on the pre-beta, which of course also has been leaked already on many torrent sites.

A little note on this pre-beta though. All of you thinking to take a quick peek already at the new hot features coming up, hold your horses, as this release hardly stocks any of the new goodies. In fact, I tried to install this release myself on my VirtualBox, but the install failed .

Finishing up this article, I’d like to share with you all a rather funny post I found on the Net, concerning Microsoft’s plans to re-release almost every Windows version ever. Have fun!

Many fellow bloggers on the Net are of course flaming Microsoft for this decision. Personally, I don’t care so much, but one has to scratch his head at the following statement:

Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7″ just makes sense.

Now, in my opinion, however you look at previous Windows releases, there is no way that this counts up to the seventh release…

Yet again, Microsoft techs seem to be intimidated, owned, bitchslapped, whatever you want to call it, by their marketing department. Or not? Let’s face it, nobody really cares about what they name it, as long as it functions. I see a lot of discussion about kernel version numbers here & there, release dates, versions, all the mumbo jumbo, but what the heck, let’s cut them some slack…

Now people who know me will attest to this, I’m not the biggest Microsoft-fan on the globe. Hell, if I’d get it my way, they’d probably have a lot less market-share. But ever since they released Vista, I’ve been seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

Yes I know, Vista is not perfect, but what OS is (and no Linux isn’t either )?? In the end, it all depends on preference, just with about anything else in life. Let’s just hope the Microsoft-boys will have learned from their mistakes with Vista. If so, I think we can expect a hell of a good release with this new version.

Anyway, the beast is out . Seems they will be handing out pre-beta versions to some developers soon, so now the wait for the rest of us to find them on torrent-sites begins!