I recently had a phone interview with a technology reporter from Arizona on Windows7 told her that based on our experience at Liberteks.com to date, Win 7 was largely success in terms of migrating and upgrading XP and Vista to run in Win 7.
But I could tell that she wanted more, that she was looking for something negative, or something that wasn’t working well. Now don’t get me wrong, she’s a top writer and editor with over 20 years in the technology industry. But her desire for news was understandable – she’s writing for software developers nationally and internationally who are looking for the latest cutting-edge information on the product.
In one circumstance, I was able to provide the case of a realtor client of mine who had an application (Top Producer), which the manufacturer claimed would only work in XP. We were able to get it to run in Win 7 using the “Compatibility Mode” function.
This created great business value for the client, who didn’t have to purchase a software upgrade and perhaps more importantly, all of her data and settings were restored exactly where she left off.
When the reporter asked if at some point old software needed to be ported to Win7 – if updated software needed to be purchased—I told her no, an upgrade would not appear to be necessary if the program was working adequately for the user.
And that was my eureka moment: Software updates were part of the old paradigm. In today’s desktop the operating system can run both the old and new apps. The desktop user interface manages the back end application.
In other words, if you want the new features and functionality of the latest update, you can go out buy the newest version, but if your software application is working well for you, you can continue to use it in the Win 7 environment.
So you can have your cake and eat it with Win 7. Give me a few months and we’ll continue to monitor it, but the ability to run all of your old programs smoothly in a Win 7 environment is a major accomplishment. I’ll continue to keep you updated.
