Headline from Gartner Press Release on Win7 Report

Reasons cited for the forecasted jump include increasing IT budgets in 2011 and 2011, along with a substantial number of Windows 7 migrations initiated in the final quarter of last year (2010). While this may seem like happy news for Microsoft, long term-predictions are less rosy for Windows. According to the already-cited TechWatch article “…it is interesting to note Gartner’s opinion that Windows 7 is likely to be the last operating system from Microsoft deployed in such numbers. Gartner attributes this prediction to the rise of ‘OS-agnostic’ applications for enterprises, meaning software not tied to a particular platform.” That story goes on to say that her research indicates that such applications are likely to comprise half of all apps in use by 2012.

I do think this means that Windows 7 has finally reached or is nearing the tipping point for enterprise adoption, but I’m not so sure that Gartner is right about a decline in Windows use in the enterprise. All that hardware (desktops and notebooks, especially) has to run some kind of OS, and there’s really no viable alternative that has all of the imaging, installation, deployment, configuration, and management tools by which enterprise IT departments live and die out there right now. I believe that Windows will remain unchallenged as the enterprise client OS until such time as a fully-fledged alternative makes itself available. Right now, this is just a mythical beast and until that critter becomes real, Windows stays in the catbird seat.