Gartner: Microsoft 'Polishing' Whatever Came Out Of Vista 'Plumbing'

(MoneyWatch) 
Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system (whatever you do, don't call it Vista II) is already a rousing success, even though it hasn't even shipped yet.

How do we know this? Because Gartner, one the most respected names in IT consulting, tells us so, saying

The move to Microsoft's latest operating system (OS), Windows 7, is all but inevitable for most organizations.

Customers may have been right to ignore Gartner's advice to migrate from Windows XP to Vista, but they'll definitely be wrong if they ignore them again, says the firm's lead Microsoft analyst, Michael Silver.

While organizations that skipped Windows 2000 and waited for XP had some problems spanning the gap, organizations that adopted Windows 2000 and tried to skip Windows XP, waiting for Vista, had a much harder time.

Apparently, you can skip a "plumbing" release like Vista (even if Gartner told you not to), but woe unto the organization that skips a "polishing" release (Windows 7), where Microsoft presumably scoops up the goop that plopped out from between the gaps. "Polishing releases should never be skipped," the firm states flatly. The only question facing IT administrators, it would seem, is how to manage the roll-out, because upgrading is a foregone conclusion.

Later in the same release, Gartner states that it's, "nearly inevitable for enterprises to move to Windows 7" (as opposed to "all but inevitable"). I guess that means they have the hard data to back this up, tons of number-crunching and reams of interviews with buyers. Right? And Gartner has never been 180-degrees wrong about stuff like this, and especially about the market for a Microsoft operating system. Or has it?

In March 2007, Gartner predicted that Vista uptake by consumers and SMBS buying new PCs "will be strong."

Of course, not only was uptake not strong, it was negative, as customers scrambled to downgrade their operating systems back to XP, because Vista wasn't nearly as good as analysts like Gartner had promised. (Mind you, 2007 wasn't a very good year for Gartner either, which predicted that "80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a 'second life'" by the end of 2011.)

So again, why does Gartner think enterprises shouldn't waste time upgrading to Windows 7?

Windows 7 has improvements in memory management to allow users to have a better experience than with Vista on PCs with similar or even slightly lower specifications-- [and] adds other features of interest to organizations, as well as to consumers.

Okay, well I'm not sure that "better than Vista" qualifies as an incentive to spend as much as $2,000 per user in upgrade costs -- by Gartner's own estimates -- but maybe there are other reasons. I'd ask Silver himself, but he hasn't gotten back to me by the time I posted this.

Long story short, if you're not doing it for yourself, for Pete's sake, do it for Microsoft. It's "important [for] Microsoft to get off to a good start," Silver noted.

That may be closer to the truth than anything else Gartner wrote in this release. And indeed, another success like Vista will really put Google in the catbird seat.