Sorry, developers, Windows 7 will not be an immediate miracle

Quoting Jim Bakker, as usual, I was wrong.

But you didn't even know about it, because I didn't share the impression that I was receiving - namely, that once Windows 7 emerged, that pesky irritant Windows Vista would magically go away, and all the people who have remained on XP would go away, and everyone would immediately upgrade to Windows 7 and live happily ever after.

InformationWeek states otherwise:

Mainstream support for XP ends (today), but, in news that bodes ill for Redmond and the broader PC industry, new data first obtained by InformationWeek indicates that only a small percentage of businesses plan to migrate to Windows 7 in its first year of availability.

Economic concerns and worries about compatibility -- the bugbear that doomed Vista in the corporate market -- will keep Windows 7 on the shelf for all but a handful of enterprises until at least 12 months after the OS becomes available later this year or early next, depending on Microsoft's release schedule.

More detail:

The survey, of more than 1,100 IT professionals, is one of the first extensive looks at Windows 7's early sales prospects. It found that a whopping 83% of enterprises plan to skip the OS in its first year. While the business market typically tends toward caution when it comes to new products, the figure is nonetheless surprising given that almost no large companies migrated to Vista and as a result most have been using XP much longer than planned.

More here.

And remember what I said on April 6?

Specifically, if your desktop application supports "Windows," what flavors of Windows will you be supporting toward the end of this year? Will you have launched your support of Windows 7? Will you continue to support Windows Vista? Do you have customers that continue to need support on Windows XP?

In the question above, I asked what people with Windows applications would do at the end of 2009. Now it looks like I'll have to ask what people with Windows applications will do at the end of 2010. Will Windows developers be forced to support three operating systems until 2011?