• Vast majority won't go for Windows 7



• 84 percent say no thanks to Windows 7



• IT pros prefer old XP over new Windows 7, survey says

Cautious business IT administrators are more willing to stay with the devil they know, Windows XP, than risk the devil they don't, even if the latter is the highly touted Windows 7, a research company said Monday.

According to Dimensional Research Inc., which surveyed more than 1,100 IT professionals in March, 72% of those polled said that they are more concerned about the cost and overhead of migrating to Windows 7 than they are about continuing to supporting the eight-year-old Windows XP. Only 28% felt the opposite, that they're more worried about holding XP's hand than migrating to Windows 7.

• The Windows 7 beta testing disaster

So what are Windows 7’s damning problems?

–Windows usage is on the decline, and while Windows XP was an acceptable OS from the standards of 2001, both the Mac OS X and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu have matured. Microsoft also launched many other business ventures that it had hoped to subsidize entirely as loss leaders using Windows and Office sales to run the other guys out of business, but with sales of those faulting combined with massive XBOX 360 hardware failures, giving up on the Zune 2 years in with 4% of the market, and failing to put a chink in Google’s services, Microsoft is getting desperate.

–They’re not listening to real users, they’re listening to a focus group if that, and the focus group gave us the McLean Deluxe, which was a total disaster for McDonalds. But unlike McDonalds, Microsoft has the advantage of no competitors. If we want to put Windows in the McLean Deluxe analogy, Windows thrives because all restaurants are McDonalds, all grocery stores are closed, and the only thing on the menu is the mystery meat. At least til lately.

–Abusing their OEM partners for years hasn’t won them any friends, and mainline PC vendors such as HP and Dell are marketing Linux systems now with no Microsoft Tax. This isn’t helped by the fact that the only thing Microsoft has that is nimble enough to run on the Netbooks that they totally failed to see coming is 8 years old (XP) and that they are giving Windows away in a massive dumping operation to keep Linux off these things, because Linux is far more capable.

–There’s no way to actually file detailed bugs and communicate with Windows developers or to have any ETA on a patch if one is coming. If you need help it costs $49.99 per incident to get someone that probably knows less than you do on the phone. You can’t just go to an IRC room and talk to the person that wrote it.

–Windows 7 is in short, Vista all over again. It may be masquerading as a huge upgrade but the changes have been trivial, superficial, and usually skin deep at best, and “eat my data” and “fail to even load my program” at worst. Even my dad saw it running on my test system while he was over the other day and thought it was Vista. I had to point to the Windows 7 build number on the desktop because there’s almost no way to tell them apart otherwise.