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October 22nd, 2010 will official mark the one-year birthday of Windows 7. No doubt, Windows 7 has been well-received by consumers and plenty of businesses. But what were the ultimate consequences for both consumers and the corporate world. Jay McBain, director of SMB at Lenovo spoke to me about the effects he's seen at Lenovo and in the industry in general. Read on for the scoop...
Dave Courbanou
September 20, 2010
3 Min Read
Windows 7 Turns 1
October 22nd, 2010 will official mark the one-year birthday of Windows 7. No doubt, Windows 7 has been well-received by consumers and plenty of businesses. But what were the ultimate consequences for both consumers and the corporate world. Jay McBain, director of SMB at Lenovo spoke to me about the effects he’s seen at Lenovo and in the industry in general. Read on for the scoop…As you may recall, Lenovo worked closely with Microsoft to deliver a “Windows 7 Enhanced Experience.” Along the way, Lenovo and Microsoft tweaked drivers and software to obtain an optimal Windows 7 experience with sub-30 second startup times and 5 second shutdown times.
McBain laments about Vista woes and how low adoption rates caused much of the corporate world to stick with Windows XP — an operating system that was nearly 10 years old. McBain also believes that Windows 7 — in a small way — brought the “death of a PC” idea to rest, as finally the computer industry as a whole had something new to build and grow with even as virtualization and cloud computing threatened the traditional model.
McBain says that before Windows 7 was officially launched, 80-90% of Lenovo’s customer base was running Windows XP. (As a 10 year old operating system, put this in perspective: Mac OS X turned 10 years old earlier this September, and by the time Windows Vista was out, Apples Mac OS X was already was in it’s 5th incarnation.)
Windows 7 being released was almost like a day of reckoning for the PC industry, says McBain, and McBain also detailed how Microsoft got Windows 7 code out to peripheral makers nearly a year in advanced to ensure compatibility and usability. Combined with a plethora of security, stability, compatibility, and performance issues that Microsoft put time and effort into, nearly a year later McBain asserted that over 50% adoption rate of Windows 7 in the corporate environment was a groundbreaking figure, with nearly 98% in the consumer market. He noted that only Windows 7 has had this kind of adoption and success. Vista only saw a 10-15% adoption rate in the corporate environment.
As Windows 7 turns one year old, McBain says:
“We’re at the start of a refresh cycle. The channel has found opportunities in migrations. [The market is] having trouble finding enough techs for Windows 7 migrations and that’s good a thing. Demand prices can go up and there’s a margin opportunity for the channel. It’s a positive, especially in a deep recession.”
Lastly, I asked McBain to share with me his favorite features of Windows 7. He glossed over BitLocker, and a few other features that made Windows 7 a good contender for security conscious environments, along with glowing Lenovo partner feedback, but settled on one thing:
“My favorite feature is the [Lenovo] Enhanced Experience.”
No surprises here.
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