There have been a lot of articles over the past month or so discussing the whole Windows 8 vs. Windows 7 migration as well as mentioning the fact that a migration to XP from Windows 7 is not as trivial as people think. One of the reasons for the difficulty in this migration is that most people skipped Vista altogether. The OS was considered to be a large technical change from XP and it did not offer a compelling reason to move to it. The amount of effort that vendors had to put into making their apps work on Vista was significant, and it became apparent rather quickly that a lot of corporate users were just going to ignore Vista completely. If these organizations had moved to Vista, the Windows 7 move would have been a lot easier.

Surveys conducted recently seem to indicate that businesses are reluctant to skip Windows 7 and move directly to 8. It’s now almost 2013 and 40% of companies are still using XP. Given the current lack of vendor support for applications running on Windows 8, that migration path is going to be even rougher than the move to Windows 7. At least with Win 7, some of the pitfalls have been discovered and cleared, and tools exist that can help you get there.

Whichever path your organization takes, you really need to start now if you haven’t already. Most of the service integrators that with which we have spoken expect a crush of last minute migrations to occur next year. This increased demand is going to lock up skilled resources rather quickly, including application packagers and desktop migration specialists. It’s going to be an exciting year!

Originally posted in: http://futurestateit.com/2012/12/07/pick-an-os-and-get-moving/ 

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