Our support staff in that area is down from 12 to 4 due to the economy. They can (barely) keep up, but it would be a minimum of 24 months before we would roll out win7 even if we were fully staffed. We would have to restaff or outsource the rollout effort.

On top of that, we have numerous business critical applications written in VB6 which have not been replaced yet. Some of them will take 4-5 man years worth of effort to rewrite and have already been shown to break on newer operating systems (and VB6 3 years out of support by Microsoft so if they break, we are SOL).

There is no clear benefit to the business to go to win7, a lot of risk around applications.

We considered Vista seriously twice in the last two years and each time, it was ultimately veto'd because of backwards compatibility. There are too many moving parts in the Windows universe. Every piece expires after 5 to 7 years and any piece can prevent the business from upgrading.

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As for me personally, the likely hood of going to win7 is *also* 0%. I went to Vista finally 7 months ago.

For me to go to Win7, it must work, it must be cheap (as in $299 to $599 laptop depending on hardware so that the O/S is really basically free).

My current application stack must be verified to work.

My current network laser printer must be verified to work.

I'd like for my artpad to work, but I could spring for another $59 to $99 in that area for a new one.

There is *no* benefit to going to Win7. My computer has been "Good Enough" since Win2k.

If anything, Win7 strongly continues the trend that I'm "borrowing" my computer from microsoft and the real owner is microsoft and the content creators. Which pisses me off. I'm old school and like the idea that I own my computer and control it. This trend may push me to linux at home eventually. Most of my software stack is opensource now.