Here comes Windows 7, get ready for a fight!
The release of Windows 7 is right around the corner (October 2009) and if you are a Windows XP user you are in for a bit of a headache. The message coming out of Microsoft is that the move to Windows 7 will not be considered an upgrade from XP, but rather have to be a clean install. That means moving to Windows 7 will take a bit of legwork if you plan on staying on the same machine and moving straight from XP. Vista users won't have this problem since W7 can be considered a close cousin and is designed to accept W7 as a straight upgrade, and in a lot of cases a free one (Vista Ultimate Users).
The biggest problem for XP users will be obtaining compatible drivers. From a technical support perspective it looks like a clean install will be the best approach for XP users and not recommended at all for users who want to run it on older hardware. If Vista is any indication W7 will be a memory hogg wanting to run in 64bit which will basically disqualifies a large percentage of the legacy XP install base who want to squeeze a bit more time out of their existing hardware. Nope, your best bet is to install W7 on a new machine if your existing system is more and a couple of years old and is not packing at least 4GB of RAM.
From what I can tell W7 looks to be a big improvement over Vista, which will go down in history as one of the worst product launches ever. Still, we will have to wait and see how the market accepts it. It's hard to say what will happen when W7 becomes generally available. Given Microsoft's history of releasing very buggy software I have to assume the uptake will be slow at first with early adopters taking the risks first on non-production machines. I for one am very interested in seeing how it plays out. I typically don't install any Microsoft products until the first Service Pack is released and I don't think Windows 7 will be an exception. I hope that Microsoft has a good release since strong competition is essential for the production of excellent products. I know it's hard to consider Apple's OSX as true competition to Microsoft's dominance in the desktop market, but since Apple's release of Tiger and Leopard have been such successes Microsoft has its work cut out for itself. Apple users can look forward to Snow Leopard in September and if W7 bombs expect to see a lot more defections from XP users since moving to W7 will, in most cases, require a new machine. Once you open a user to spending a couple thousand dollars on a new computer the criteria changes. In this case it's further compounded by the fact that there is an XP driver compatiblity issue.
I can't wait to see what happens.