New OS Offers Opportunity

Late October brought the much anticipated market arrival of Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping to move past the poor market acceptance of Windows Vista and improve the Windows revenue stream.

You see, most large organizations never moved from Windows XP to Vista. In fact, Microsoft actually found itself making it easy for customers to stay on XP.

Unfortunately, even though Microsoft has dropped support for XP, they may have made it easier once more for customers to stay on XP, as upgrading from XP to Windows 7 requires a complicated “custom install” procedure that is not for the faint of heart. The labor time required for this “custom install,” plus the cost of the operating system “upgrade” makes it such that you are probably money ahead just buying a new computer.

Computer hardware manufacturers are thrilled – they expect hardware sales to boom.

Meanwhile, on the same day as the Windows 7 roll out, Apple’s earnings announcement showed a quarterly revenue increase year-over-year of almost $2 billion. Macintosh computer sales were up 17 percent. A whooping 7.4 million iPhones and 10.2 million iPods were sold during the quarter.

Apple’s latest operating system, Snow Leopard, hit the market during the quarter with an upgrade price tag of $29, which was $100 less than the price of a Windows 7 upgrade kit.

On the smart phone front, Google is now running commercials for their open source Android operating system.  These cleverly list, in Apple’s font, all of the functions an iPhone can’t do that are available on a “Droid” phone. All major cell phone carriers will soon have Android driven phones in the market.

On the smart phone application front, Apple’s “App Store” is being joined by similar offerings from RIM, maker of BlackBerry devices, Palm and Google.

Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is growing publicly angry with the number of iPhones being used by Microsoft employees. There is no announced date for the long awaited upgrade to the Windows mobile operating system. Microsoft employee blogger, Mini-Microsoft, has chastised the company about their poor performance in the mobile arena and announced that he is buying an iPhone.

What do these things mean to your business?

Unfortunately, an opportunity to spend more money than you really need to.

While Windows 7 is definitely an improvement over Vista, it isn’t worth upgrading an old XP based computer to run Windows 7. Truthfully, there is nothing Windows 7 does in the business environment that XP doesn’t do adequately. So, if your XP based machine is getting the job done, leave it running. Let Windows 7 come along with the next desktop machine purchase.

If you are in the market for a laptop, look hard at Apple. If you substitute Apple’s $79 iWork software for Microsoft Office, a similarly equipped 13-inch laptop from Dell is actually $100 more expensive than a Mac laptop. iWork both reads and writes Microsoft Office files. If you follow this column you know that both Google and ZoHo provide Web-based alternatives to Microsoft Office that are essentially free. With Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system including built-in support for Microsoft Exchange, no Microsoft software is needed on the laptop.

Much of what desktop and laptop computers are used for is moving to the smart phone. E-mail and calendar fully synchronized to your desktop or laptop, or the “cloud,” is the norm, not the exception. You can do banking, stock trades, read business documents and reports, keep up with key markets – even manage your fantasy football team – right from your smart phone.

Many providers of business software are adding smart phone based front-end applications for making secure transactions and viewing business information such as inventory and order status. Larger organizations are beginning to write smart phone applications for internal use. As smart phones develop further, a large percentage of the people that currently use desktop or laptop computers will not replace them.

With solution possibilities changing rapidly, small and mid-sized business owners have many options to both improve quality and lower their technology cost structure. Choosing poorly could lead to unnecessary costs. 

Steve Hankins is CEO and co-founder of Accio.US of Springdale, a technology company providing advisory and management services for small to medium-sized businesses. He may be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter as @stevehankins or @accious.