The takeaway here is clearly that migration to Windows 7 is more a "must do" than "want to do" decision; that is, it's driven largely by the fact that XP, the OS most people currently use, is going away (or, more correctly, Microsoft support for XP is going away).

This isn't so shocking when you look at the OS migration decision from a business perspective. I started this blog saying I'm a "big fan" of Windows 7. That's not exactly an ROI-based observation. Enterprises, especially in these economically constrained times, make their decisions based on business imperatives, not the perceived coolness of a new operating system. (I'm being reductionist here. I don't mean to minimize the very real improvements in performance, security, and virtualization performance in Vista. Also the attention to deployment and configuration tools, though full use of the Windows 7 ecosystem requires enterprises to have their back end upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2.

The decision to skip Vista, clocking in at 33%, shouldn't be minimized either. The back story here is that there's a lot of pent-up demand for an OS which can exploit today's hardware.

This whole picture of "we aren't really excited about upgrading but are gonna get around to it" dovetails with the findings of a new Forrester survey. The summary of the report, by Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray, says: "With Windows 7 generally available on October 22, 2009, most IT operations professionals are in a holding pattern. They successfully standardized on Windows XP, couldn't justify an upgrade to Windows Vista in tough economic times - or simply didn't even attempt to given the political hot button that Windows Vista has become - and plan to start their enterprisewide Windows 7 deployments in the late 2010/early 2011 time frame in line with the start of the next anticipated major corporate PC refresh cycle."

Windows 7 screen shot (Click for larger image and for full photo gallery.)

For further reading, check out, Wolfe's Den: Windows 7 Deep Dive

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of InformationWeek.com.