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.

I'm usually not so much the Linux evangelist, but so many people in this thread are complaining about MS that it seems appropriate. I switched to Ubuntu last year and have had a great experience. Its really simple to use, gets great performance, and is far more secure than Windows. I'd encourage you to give it a try. You can down load a LiveCD and run Ubuntu from you CD drive without installing or changing anything. This lets you give it a test run to see if you like it and to make sure its compatible with your machine.

I'm mostly opensource at home tho I've experimented with the LiveCD's.

There is *zero* chance my company is going to linux in a big way.

We are big enough that microsoft fixes bugs for us tho. I recommended we should set up a credible linux pilot program just to get the 50% discount usually given by microsoft in those cases.

You said that you were thinking of linux at home, so it seemed a good suggestion. The difficulties of getting a big company to switch away from MS after so many years is exactly why MS does so well. The cost of retraining employees and of rewriting legacy code is just too high.

Hey Maxo,

It may not be cost-efficient, or even make sense to go go to Windows 7 all the way - but it is quite possible you will need to upgrade in some areas just because new development tools give you an ability to design and create applications faster and make them much more robust.

In general, if a system is 5 man-years in size it would benefit greatly form the true OO nature of VB.NET or C#.

We have ASP.NET 2--3 applications that would take much less time to develop and end up with much simpler algorithms, if AJAX was as easy to implement back then as it is now. Not to mention Silverlight makes it possible to create web apps that with a classic JScript interface are just not feasable do to enormous amount of JScript source code required to make a webpage run.

Sooner or later you will discover, that people can do what you do faster and cheaper with newer tools. That is how Fortune 500 companies fail.

There was a big war between .net and java at the company between 2002 and 2004.

.Net lost because we could not retain .Net developers because the company could not afford the salary levels nor could it compete with contracting houses for "fun development" time (vs "unfun support time").

Java sort of won but not really. The salespeople brought in "even shinier" tools which would fix everything and showed them to management and now that is the focus. The issue with Java is that our programmers actually get to program about 8 to 16 hours a week due to Sox controls.

We really let outside contractors run wild but keep an incredibly tight leash on our in house staff. Apparently because a Sox violation would raise our insurance and drop our stock.

I think ultimately, the company is headed towards canned software. The cost of legal compliance in custom software and staff retention was higher than they want to sustain. Even when the canned software fails, the executives define it as succeeding so the writing is on the wall.

Windows will be our desktop for the future- but Windows 7 is just not going to happen. I say 2 years but I'm betting more like 4. And where they *really* seem to want to go is virtual and locked down desktops for everyone (no personal data or programs of any kind).