Windows Vista was well-known for the poor adoption it saw in the business sector, even though consumers were choosing it over XP more often than not. Will the situation change with Windows 7? A new survey by ScriptLogic, a company that helps other companies manage their Windows systems and security, claims the majority of corporations have no plans to quickly move to Windows 7. Relax, it's not as bad as it may seem at first glance.

The survey, which received feedback from 1,000 IT administrators (20,000 surveys were distributed), found that 41 percent of organizations plan a wholesale migration to Windows 7 by the end of 2010 (after just over 14 months). 5.4 percent of respondents said they expected to move to Windows 7 by the end of 2009 (after just over two months). To give you some perspective, Windows 7 is expected to RTM by the end of the month and to hit General Availability (GA) on October 22, 2009. ScriptLogic pointed out that this is actually a strong adoption rate when compared to the 12 to 14 percent adoption rate of Windows XP in its first year.

One of the questions asked during the survey was "What is your biggest barrier to deploying Windows 7?" and there were five options to choose from. Here are how the respondents answered:

Time and Resources: 42.7 percent

Application Compatibility: 39.1 percent

OS Deployment / Migration: 8.4 percent

Hardware Support: 7.5 percent

Migration of User Settings: 2.2 percent

Windows Vista sold over 180 million copies as of July 2008, and Windows 7 will likely do much better. It's hard to tell, however, if the fraction of these sales that are to businesses will be bigger or smaller with the upcoming release. Businesses are battling the recession: the cost to move to a newer operating system is a much bigger deal to them than to the average consumer picking up a new laptop. Still, the numbers are looking quite good for Microsoft.