Last week, the Gartner Group made some headlines (including this one from my ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley) with a provocative press release that tried to pin a price tag on the cost of migrating to Windows 7. The press release throws out four separate price tags, ranging from $1,205 to $2,069 per PC, with some confusing percentages to quantify overall IT budget increases. But in their zeal to come up with hard numbers, the press release adds more confusion than clarification to the topic. In some cases, the numbers just don't add up.
Gartner was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the full report. After reading it over, I've come up with a slightly different set of conclusions. The executive summary? If you run a Windows shop and you've been paying attention to the Windows landscape for the past two or three years, you've got few surprises in store, and Gartner's alarming numbers don't apply to you. But if you pinned all your hopes on the "Save XP" movement, you've got some serious catching up to do, and your migration bill is likely to be much higher than it would have been otherwise.
Here are the places where I agree and disagree with the Gartner study.
Yes, it's an important issue.
According to analyst Charles Smulders, Gartner estimates that large and midsize organizations will migrate approximately 250 million PCs from Windows XP to Windows 7 in the next two or three years. That sounds about right to me, and is certainly in line with some of the projections I've seen lately. And staying on XP is not an option—at least not for any workstation that is actually connected to the Internet.
Your migration away from XP should be in the final stages by early 2013.
I agree with Gartner completely on this point. Support for Windows XP ends formally in April 2014, but third-party software companies will probably be phasing out their support during 2013. In addition, it is prudent to allow some slack in the schedule for things to go wrong, as they always do. In the timeline that accompanies the Gartner report, 2013 and 2014 are colored bright red and labeled the "XP Danger Zone."
To hit that 2013 deadline, your migration had better be under way now.
Absolutely right. If your IT operation rolls like a well-oiled machine, you've already begun deploying Windows 7 on a three- or four-year cycle that will have XP completely off your network in plenty of time for the April 2014 deadline. Gartner assumes PC hardware replacement cycles of 3.25 years for a notebook and a little less than five years for a desktop. If you're buying new PCs today expecting them to last four years, they'd better be starting with Windows 7 and not with XP.
What might not have been clear in those Gartner numbers that were so widely reported is that they include the capital costs of new PCs and Windows licenses. According to my calculations, Gartner is pegging the cost of a new PC with a Windows 7 Professional license at somewhere between $723 and $1,199. PCs are depreciable assets, so those costs aren't optional, although their timing is.
So, what happens if you haven't already started a migration?
If you're just beginning to realize that you're behind in your migration planning, then Gartner's warnings definitely apply to you. Let's call it the "XP diehard tax," which Gartner says you'll pay in one of two ways:
That sounds about right. If your natural hardware replacement cycle is disrupted, you pay extra. Where Gartner loses me in the discussion is with the numbers in the full report, which simply don't add up. According to the report, those upgrade costs (including the Windows license) equal more than $1,600 per PC, which is double the cost of a new PC. I suspect it's a typo, and I've sent an e-mail to Gartner asking for clarification. I'll update this post when I hear back.
Update September 9: It took a while, but Gartner's Charles Smulders finally got back to me. As I suspected, that number is not accurate. The correct figure they used to calculate the cost of an upgrade is $835, which is only a few hundred dollars less than the cost of a maxed-out new PC with a Windows 7 Professional license.
If you've put together a comprehensive migration strategy, Gartner's numbers don't apply to you.
A few big qualifications are buried in the fine print of that Gartner report, and a couple aren't mentioned at all.
So, what's the overall impact on IT budgets?
In her headline, Mary Jo Foley called out the most alarming number from the Gartner report: IT shops moving to Windows 7 need a 20 to 60 percent PC budget increase. But as the report makes clear, the PC budget typically represents only 15% of a typical IT budget, which means that a 20-60% increase in the PC budget actually represents an overall increase of only 3% (best case, according to Gartner) or 9% (worst case). And given the numbers I calculated, companies that began planning for migration three years ago and invested in advanced deployment tools could actually see their PC costs drop, percentage-wise, during the course of this migration. Imagine that.