October 22nd, 2010 will official mark the one-year birthday of Windows 7. No doubt, Windows 7 has been well-received by consumers and plenty of businesses. But what were the ultimate consequences for both consumers and the corporate world. Jay McBain, director of SMB at Lenovo spoke to me about the effects he’s seen at Lenovo and in the industry in general. Read on for the scoop…
As you may recall, Lenovo worked closely with Microsoft to deliver a “Windows 7 Enhanced Experience.” Along the way, Lenovo and Microsoft tweaked drivers and software to obtain an optimal Windows 7 experience with sub-30 second startup times and 5 second shutdown times.
McBain laments about Vista woes and how low adoption rates caused much of the corporate world to stick with Windows XP — an operating system that was nearly 10 years old. McBain also believes that Windows 7 — in a small way — brought the “death of a PC” idea to rest, as finally the computer industry as a whole had something new to build and grow with even as virtualization and cloud computing threatened the traditional model.
McBain says that before Windows 7 was officially launched, 80-90% of Lenovo’s customer base was running Windows XP. (As a 10 year old operating system, put this in perspective: Mac OS X turned 10 years old earlier this September, and by the time Windows Vista was out, Apples Mac OS X was already was in it’s 5th incarnation.)
Windows 7 being released was almost like a day of reckoning for the PC industry, says McBain, and McBain also detailed how Microsoft got Windows 7 code out to peripheral makers nearly a year in advanced to ensure compatibility and usability. Combined with a plethora of security, stability, compatibility, and performance issues that Microsoft put time and effort into, nearly a year later McBain asserted that over 50% adoption rate of Windows 7 in the corporate environment was a groundbreaking figure, with nearly 98% in the consumer market. He noted that only Windows 7 has had this kind of adoption and success. Vista only saw a 10-15% adoption rate in the corporate environment.
As Windows 7 turns one year old, McBain says:
“We’re at the start of a refresh cycle. The channel has found opportunities in migrations. [The market is] having trouble finding enough techs for Windows 7 migrations and that’s good a thing. Demand prices can go up and there’s a margin opportunity for the channel. It’s a positive, especially in a deep recession.”
Lastly, I asked McBain to share with me his favorite features of Windows 7. He glossed over BitLocker, and a few other features that made Windows 7 a good contender for security conscious environments, along with glowing Lenovo partner feedback, but settled on one thing:
“My favorite feature is the [Lenovo] Enhanced Experience.”
No surprises here.
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“McBain asserted that over 50% adoption rate of Windows 7 in the corporate environment was a groundbreaking figure”
It would be, indeed, groundbreaking if only it were true. What’s is source for such a figure?
Mike,
Source was IDC survey from Aug 12, 2010 (690 respondents covering all size businesses across 27 industries) showing 48% have started rolling Windows 7. Predictably, the larger the business, the lower the adoption rate.
Drop me a line and I can share more details jamcbain@lenovo.com.
Hmmm, 48% is not over 50%. What am i missing?
Curious how much corporate effort will be put to customize a Windows machine when they all end up looking the same, yet when GNU/Linux machine comes out there is very little customization and differentiation by the manufacturer. Then again, they don’t usually create very good software or UIs anyways.
Gustavo,
I simply used the August survey of 48% and used the Commercial sales reports from NPD (since then) to determine the number is close to 51% today. Not an exact science but the point of the article is that it is a significant (and surprising) result that the numbers are that high in the first year of a new OS.
Great article Jay. It is a significant result for the first year.
We on the Consumer side are more than satisfied with the results, and support the ‘facts’.
The VAR Guy always takes note when a “balanced” article about Microsoft seems to attract skeptics. McBain didn’t make any outrageous claims. And he seems to be backing up his points with real-world data.
The VAR Guy beat Microsoft up pretty good for Windows Vista. But it seems like Windows 7 has enjoyed a solid reception. Sure, many companies are slow to adopt but that seems more tied to the economy than to Win7 concerns. Correct?
-TVG
“It’s not as bad as Vista” isn’t much of sales pitch though, is it? Especially for companies that don’t even have Vista, which is by far the majority of them.
Sure, the economy is making a difference. Companies are being much more hard-headed about exactly what any upgrades are going to gain them. They’re looking at Windows 7 and thinking “well, what’s in it for us?”. “Not much” is the answer, IMHO.
Its perceived responsiveness and reduced resource requirements are only when compared to Vista.
More secure? I can’t recall any big virus hits in the last year from which Windows 7 was exempt. The USB drive virus? The Windows shortcut virus? I think 7 was nailed by them all.
The UI changed do a great job of moving functions around for no good reason, so little is where you expect to be if you’re used to XP. The ability to pin apps to the Start Bar has been there since Windows 1998. Most apps offer to put in icon there as part of their install routines, in fact.
Windows 7 Media Centre works quite nicely, although it insists in record TV shows in its own, proprietary and non-standard format. But that’s of no interest to corporates anyway.
Purely on merit, the Windows 7 upgrade is a total waste of time, effort and money.