Yeah, a lot of old apps will break because programming styles and the technology have changed drastically.

This is good reading for all those "corporations need to get with the program and upgrade" people who say corporations are too slow to upgrade.

That Intel worked with Microsoft on the OS and is still taking a careful approach should tell you something about arbitrarily updating to an OS without thought.

Upgrading is not as easy and seamless as some would like to believe. There's a lot of thought that goes into these things.

A most practical decision by Intel.

KremmenUK said:

A tad late now though !

Fortunately I have no known problems (apart from my games colour issues when Explorer is running).

I don’t have problems with my car, but that doesn’t mean high ranking officials can just get in and go. Security, amongst other things come to mind

And the average everyday home user doesn’t require the security and other features required of a large corporation like Intel

JMH said:

Challenges include issues related to backward application compatibility, Web browser support, 64-bit computing and privacy controls.

That's pretty much every company out there.

they should have been planning a long time ago, and should have budgeted to upgrade that legacy software. I'm sure whatever old software they run has some better version now.

XP is on extended support already, and support will end in 2014. This makes it even less secure than it already is compared to W7. All has been known for a long time.

Our IT are "testing" W7 this year to see if they use it next year for new PCs. this means (we are on a 3-year PC replacement if budget allows), there will be XP PCs for years to come, even when W8 will be out. When they test it this year, what were they doing last year while I had the RC at home? And i suspect they only will do 32-bit. This brings me with my CAD applications that need 8+ GB in a problem. At home on 8GB W7 64 AutoCAD MEP works flawlessly and fast. At work with the 4 GB XP 32 it crashes, has problem starting and is slow. As long as they pay me by the hour they have the right to make my work as inefficient as they want.
(they gave us Office 2007 this year, so we spend much money on almost outdated software)

change always will hurt and cost money... but once you plan on doing it, and doing it right, it will be more beneficial. Waiting too long doesn't help. It would have taken Intel (and our IT) the same effort last year to investigate that as it does now.

Sure, most IT folks wait for SP1 to roll out W7. But that doesn't mean you could plan before SP1 comes out. Since W7 only has 5 years full and 6-10 years extended support, we only will have 2-3 years of the OS with full support, some of the PCs will get it once W7 goes into extended support (only security patches). that all with the same money and pain as doing it right away.

One concern for corporations is that XP 'downgrades' will only be done through Sept. or Oct. so any new machines coming through will HAVE to have Vista SP1 or better. I do support for a large company, we still use Office 2000, XP SP2 and IE6. They are looking at rolling out Office 2010, XP SP3, IE8 and start with Win 7 on new machines in Sept. or Oct. They have beta builds out for app. testing as we speak, and I'm using their Office 2010 RC package, the Win 7 package isn't production-ready yet. You can bet I'll be using Win 7 as soon as they have a production image out.