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By Nick Heath, 22 October 2009 11:18

NEWS

Some businesses that are partway through upgrading to Windows Vista are asking to swap the OS for Windows 7, according to Microsoft.

Speaking at the London launch of Windows 7 today John Curran, the Microsoft exec who until recently headed up the Windows client group in the UK, said: "This is the first time that we have had customers talking about slipstreaming the deployment of one OS into another version, so they started with Vista and continue with Windows 7."

This would mean machines that have already been upgraded would keep the Vista OS but that Windows 7 would be installed on machines during future upgrades.

Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system is proving more popular with business than Windows Vista
(Photo credit: Renai LeMay/ZDNet.com.au)

Businesses have been reluctant to install Vista because of software compatibility problems and its powerful demands on hardware and, as a result, it is installed on only about 15 per cent of business PCs in the UK.

Windows 7 is already proving more popular, there are already 10 large companies in the UK which have begun the process of deploying Windows 7 on a total of 300,000 machines, according to Microsoft.

The companies include engineering firm Atkins, airport operator BAA, business advisors Baker Tilly, Deutsche Bank and drinks maker innocent - all of which are upgrading from a mix of Windows XP and Vista.

"In terms of the numbers of seats being deployed at launch we are well ahead of where we were from a Vista perspective," Curran said.

He said businesses had been encouraged to switch to Windows 7 by the OS's compatibility with Windows Vista-compliant software and Windows 7's more modest system requirements.

"The Vista early adopter companies would do 100 to 200 seats but then stuck at that while they tried to get the hardware and the software ready," he said.

"Now the hardware is in place to run Windows 7 and the internal and packaged software tuned ready to run on Windows 7 or Vista."

A survey of European and US IT professionals found more than half of new corporate PCs would run Windows 7 within 12 months.

Curran said if the prediction is correct, it would mean Windows 7 would have been adopted by business more quickly than any other Microsoft OS.

"In the past the first year OS adoption has always been in the single figures," he said.