With 240 million copies sold, Windows 7 has certainly been hugely successful. Windows XP, however, remains the most common version of Windows, and corporate customers are a big part of Windows XP's continued ubiquity. Earlier this week, Ars talked to Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Windows Product Management, about this corporate roll-out.

It's to be expected that businesses will adopt a new platform more slowly than consumers. Consumers will generally stick with the operating system pre-installed on a new computer, and so migrate, in a sense, "automatically." Businesses tend to standardize their configurations and software installs, so they think nothing of downgrading a machine bought with Windows 7 to Windows XP, should Windows XP be the corporate standard. This downgrading was a significant factor in Windows Vista's life, and continues to be a feature of the business world today.

Microsoft doesn't know—or at least, won't say—how big a deal downgrading has been so far. But with company estimates that 100 million of the 240 million copies sold so far went to business users, there are sure to be many millions of downgraded installations.

Schuster is confident, however, that the tide is turning. A range of studies, most recently from Forrester Research, shows that over the next twelve months, a sizeable majority of businesses will start to roll out Windows 7 on its desktops.

Transition factors

Three factors were cited in this transition: the consumerization of IT, the growth of cloud services, and the use of desktop virtualization. Of these, the first is perhaps most interesting. The argument essentially is that consumers will use, and enjoy, Windows 7 on their home PCs, and will subsequently demand it on their office PCs.

This is the route by which the iPhone probably became significant in the enterprise space—C-level executives wanted to use their new Apple toys with their company systems, giving IT departments no choice but to support them—but it's nonetheless a little surprising to hear it cited as a factor for desktop operating system uptake. Although satisfaction with Windows 7 has been high—94% of customers are satisfied with the operating system, according to a gloriously unscientific Lifehacker poll—seeing this translate to platform advocacy in the workplace is unusual.

And in a change from Windows deployment norms, these migration plans aren't dependent on Service Pack 1. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is planned to be a relatively minor update; it will contain a raft of fixes, but little in the way of new functionality. It looks like corporations have taken this on board and are willing to press ahead with deployments independent of the Service Pack's availability.

The new features that the Service Pack does add are aimed at Windows Server 2008 R2. The two new features, RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory, improve virtualization scenarios. RemoteFX in particular is of interest to desktop users, as it allows the use of server-side hardware-accelerated graphics to provide a richer experience even on underpowered desktop machines. The use of virtualization to provide a complete desktop experience to users is still relatively unusual in the Windows world, but may become more common as this technology is deployed.

While virtual desktop infrastructure is likely to remain a niche technology, application virtualization—where indivudal applications are isolated into virtual machines using systems such as Microsoft's App-V—is expected to become far more widespread. According to Gartner, around 50% of businesses are planning to use application virtualization as part of their Windows 7 roll-outs, with reduced management overhead and easier deployment cited as the reasons.

Whatever the reason for the migrations—user demand, desire for Windows 7's lower TCO (a claimed saving of $140 per PC per year) and improved virtualization features, or the dawning realization that 2014, and the end of Windows XP's support, is getting ever closer—the message from industry seems to be clear: Windows XP is on the way out, and Windows 7 on the way in.