MS India to migrate from Windows Vista to Windows 7

Microsoft India is soon going to come up with an upgradation programme for those who are using Windows Vista to migrate to its latest operating system (OS), Windows 7. While Windows Vista enterprise customers will be able to upgrade to Windows 7 by paying a portion of its license fee, the company is also planning to offer similar lucrative offers for other users as well.

Talking to ET, Microsoft India MD Rajan Anandan said the company has lined up a series of lucrative offers to promote its latest bet, Windows 7. "We are enabling IT heads and CIOs of our enterprise customers to fully experience Windows 7 before its launch. We are also going to license the OS to a few hundreds of customers even before its official launch to create excitement around it'" he said.

IT circles claim Microsoft's strategy to promote Windows 7 has been quite unique and is a first of its kind. The industry feels the move has been triggered due to two reasons: the wide spread criticism which Microsoft faced with Windows Vista and the fact that enterprises are still going slow on refreshing or upgrading their IT Infrastructure.
Microsoft plans to launch Windows 7 on October 22 across the globe. It will also launch another new product, Windows Server 2008 R2, on the same date. This product will have virtualisation capabilities built into it.

"We also plan to launch a latest version of our mobile phone OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, in a couple of months time. At present, Windows Mobile is the second largest smartphone OS in India, next to Nokia," Mr Anandan said.

Mr Anandan added that Windows Mobile phones have outstripped Blackberry smartphones 3:1 in the Indian smartphone market. Of the 100 million mobile handsets sold in India, around 6 million are currently smartphones, he said.