Windows 7: Leaving a Legacy
The majority of companies may still be on Windows XP, but the inevitable migration to Windows 7 will spur a lot of legacy code updates. At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Microsoft's CFO Peter Klein reported 90 million copies of Windows 7 have sold since the October launch, mainly in consumer and retail sales. During the first half of its fiscal year which ended in December, Microsoft sold 60 million units.
"That was a great result, and we're very well positioned going forward into 2010 and 2011 as we see a pickup in enterprise IT spend, which we haven't seen really start to grow through our first fiscal half," said Klein, who also expects an enterprise refresh cycle to drive Windows 7 into more businesses.
"It's not precisely certain when that will happen and how fast it will happen, but as we've been saying consistently for the last several quarters, we expect it to happen this calendar year and go into next calendar year, and that will be a really good thing," he said. "That will be a really good catalyst for growth for our PC business."
The momentum of Windows 7 will play a big part in the decisions of many companies to modernize their legacy software, which could be painful.
"Right now about 98 percent of our clients are on XP, but we're seeing some acceptance of Windows 7. Some of the larger ones are talking about rollouts," Steve Pownall, chief executive of healthcare claims systems provider BEMAS Software, told me last month when I interviewed him for an article on legacy migration issues. Pownall cited HIPAA regulations as the reason for some of the activity, because Windows 7 supports whole-disk encryption.
"I think [companies] need to do it sooner rather than later, just because Windows 7 looks like it's going to hurt quite a few applications out there when it comes to the legacy apps," he said. "So I suggest people start on the project -- if they haven't started already -- to try to get it out, because Microsoft's not slowing down any."
Pownall's company, acquired by Evolution Benefits in July, faced a separate set of issues, migrating from VB6 to C#/.NET based on market demands. His dev team opted to use a migration tool and then reworked about a third of codebase. The next step is to integrate the product's functionality with Evolution's, already a C#/.NET shop.
The cover story in the March issue of Visual Studio Magazine, Unlocking Legacy Code looks at Pownell's migration project and others. A total rewrite is something people should look at only after considering more phased approaches that reuse assets, advised Microsoft's Matt Carter. "In other words, the IP is the asset but the code is no longer an asset."
Is your company rolling out Windows 7? What does it mean for you as a developer? Express your views on the migration process and share what you learned along the way. Drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 03/04/2010 at 3:09 PM