IT's 'love affair' with Windows XP ending, says survey
Admins divorce aging OS, hook up with sexier Windows 7 trophy
By Gregg Keizer
March 17, 2010 04:12 PM ET
Computerworld - Businesses are finally prying their hands from Windows XP as they warm to Windows 7, a research company said today.
"Over the years, IT has had a real love affair with XP," said Diane Hagglund, a senior analyst at Dimensional Research and the author of a poll that surveyed over 900 IT professionals in January. "It was just a great OS. It just worked for them. But that feeling is going away."
According to Hagglund, 60% of those polled said that they were more concerned about the cost and overhead of migrating to
Windows 7 than they were about continuing to supporting the nearly-nine-year-old Windows XP. The remaining 40% felt the opposite, that they were more worried about holding XP's hand than migrating to Windows 7.
While the majority is still with XP on this, the trend is towards Windows 7, Hagglund noted. In April 2009, when Dimensional did a similar survey and asked the same question of IT administrators,
72% sided with XP, only 28% with Windows 7.
In other words, one out of every six IT professionals who last year would have taken XP over Windows 7 was won over by the new operating system in the intervening nine months.
