Oh, Wait, They Didn’t Say That at All… (update)

So the web is alive with stories today saying that 60% of companies plan to skip Windows 7[1,2 3 for example, I’m sure there are others], wow, that’s huge news, can this be true?

No, If you actually read the articles, they don’t say that at all, what they say is:

1. Out of 20,000 companies actually polled, 1000 responded.
2. 33%+ say they plan to roll-out Windows 7 by end the 2010
3. 59% said they have "no plans to deploy at this time" (my emphasis)

Now anybody with even the most basic reading comprehension skills can see that the survey doesn’t say that they would skip Windows 7 entirely. Ed McCracken’s blog on Windows adoption rates (see here), puts these figures in some perspective, according to his report, Windows XP had roughly 36% market share by the end of 2002, so I doubt Microsoft is losing too much sleep over this report. In fact 33% by the end of 2010 looks like a pretty standard enterprise Windows adoption cycle, and much better than Vista did in the corresponding period. But why let factual reporting get in the way of a good headline!

I bet they got lots of web hits with headline like “Microsoft Windows 7 Will Be Skipped by 6 in 10 Companies, Says Survey”, throw in some meaningless speculation about Google’s desktop and you’ve got perfect fodder for Slashdot discussions!

Update

It’s actually worse than I thought, Ed Bott has tracked down the original report (here) which says that 41% of the respondents plan to implement Windows 7 by the end of 2010, which is a very high figure for a new operating system release (especially pre-SP1). Ed also found a slew of additional articles that seemed to willfully miss the point. Ed’s blog entry is here. Seriously, how does the tech press get away with this?

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Comments

[Chandler Hall]

In the SEO space, this type of traffic grabbing headline is called "linkbait". The author is likely trying to get bloggers and Tweeters to reBroadcast and link back to the article.

Linkbaiting is trending upward fairly aggressively... And with a recent dismissal of a popular nationwide columnist being dismissed due to a poor online 'presence' / low blog traffic, I suspect we'll be seeing more of this from repected news sources unfortunately.