Microsoft Applies Vista Lessons To Upgrade Windows 7 Launch For Partners

The success of many technology vendors, hardware or software, often depends on an associated ecosystem of partners who have developed and sell business solutions on the vendor’s platform products. When the vendor improves or upgrades its technology and launches a new version of its platform, one critical success factor for the product launch is therefore the ease of migration to the new system for the partner ecosystem. The more complex the platform, the more challenging the upgrade becomes; and the more successful the platform, the larger the inertia of the ecosystem is to move at all. Microsoft met this challenge at the launch of its Vista operating environments in 2007 and learned from those times to improve its partner program to assist partners to adopt and migrate to the Windows 7 environment. This factor has now become even more critical as partners now have several realistic platform alternatives to consider.