But it’s probably not what Microsoft would have liked. Between Windows XP and Windows 8 stands Windows 7. And this is one OS that most businesses have in mind when upgrading, it seems.
The latest to make the move is the low-cost airline operator — easyJet.
Andy Caddy, the CTO of easyJet shared the news with ZDNet that migrating from Windows XP is a priority for the company. The process, according to him, has already begun, and no less than 9,000 employees are set to get access to an improved operating system.
Operating system, as in Windows 7, thank you! As Andy explained:
“XP served its purpose for a long time. It may not have had the bells and whistles but it did its job very satisfactorily. It was reliable and it did what it needed to do — and people have sweated that asset. From our point of view that’s exactly what we did. We’re a very low-cost company and with a very lean IT budget and we thought we’d get the most out of the technology.”
The switch, it appears started in 2010, but takes around 3 years to complete. Once done, Windows 7 will power the 2,500 laptops and desktop computers of the company. Caddy continued:
“We’ve had examples where it’s taken four or five minutes to boot up and this is in an environment where pilots and crew are going into crew rooms and they have got to be on a plane in 15 minutes, so you can’t have that. We set this target where everything had to be under 30 seconds and we beat that by a long, long way.”
This is something Microsoft probably hopes to see from everyone and everybody in its user base, as the company has expressed its desire to move all users to a newer version of Windows — Windows 8, preferably, but Redmond will even take Windows 7 for now as Windows 8 warms up.