Can Windows 7 Go Viral?Can Windows 7 Go Viral?

It seems highly likely that most of your organizations will move to Windows 7 in the coming years, unlike your violent indifference to Vista. Along the way, there's a test of Win 7 to watch for: Will it go viral among employees?By going viral, what I mean is will employees lobby for Win 7, will they gin up reasons they can't do without it, will some even sneak it in the side door? While the company's OS choice will ultimately be an executive decision, we've seen employee demand play a more important role in determining what technology people have at work, so it's a force to watch.

In our magazine cover story, we explore CIOs' thinking about Windows 7, and we offer some original research. We find that half of companies have tested the OS, but more than a third have no plans yet for when they'll deploy it. Some that passed on Vista, like Del Monte, are back as early adopters of Win 7, expecting productivity gains as well as an employee retention benefit from giving people the latest technology. We don't have data on employee attitudes about the OS. A few features, like remote access without the VPN login step, will be cheered, but there's nothing I've read about in Win 7 that'll ignite that widespread viral push from employees.

Think "viral" is asking a bit too much of enterprise software? Actually, Microsoft's Sharepoint juggernaut is proving to be exactly that, once it gets inside a company. The marketing team gets Sharepoint, likes it, so when marketing works with logistics they insist they all use Sharepoint. And another convert's born. Win 7 should be so lucky.

What do you think--will employees clamor to get Windows 7 on their work PCs?

(To learn more about Windows 7, visit this Techweb virtual event Sept. 30.)