An article on Techmeme is suggesting that Windows 7 might have moved forward a year and arrive sometime late in 09. Whether this is true or not who knows, but from my perspective as an enterprise customer it would make some sense – and probably make my life easier in the long run!
Selling a Vista migration to the people who will pay the bills is proving to be quite a task. The business isn’t overly interested in what OS we choose to run, only that they have the applications they need, can use them where they are and that they’re nice and speedy. This makes Vista rather a hard sell, especially considering the work needed to assess and fix Vista compatibility for application portfolio of some 1600 apps. That’s not to say Vista isn’t a great product – I’d have migrated six months ago if it was up to me.
Bringing Windows 7 forwards would provide businesses with a renewed incentive to move away from XP. It’d assume it’ll include a whole bunch of new functionality to further improve on Vista (mobile working, deployment etc), and I’d guess will also provide improved support for some MS’s S+S initiatives – something we’ll be looking at in a lot of detail this year.
The problem for MS is that a quicker release would be effectively writing off Vista for any big corporate’s who haven’t already started their Vista migration. Certainly if the move is true I would doubt we would do much work towards a vista, we’d delay those projects by six months to include Windows 7. Having said that, those same large corporates are going to have enterprise licensing so they’ll probably be paying for a ‘desktop’ not the version of windows that’s on it. Interesting stuff… 
