Legal Marketing & PR

Why Windows 7 Will Bomb in Law Firms

By Larry Bodine

In an article in the ABA Journal, Dennis Kennedy makes it pretty clear that the new Windows 7 operating system will bomb in law firms.

1. Most law firms have installed Windows XP, it works fine and they don't want to fix what's not broken.
2. There is no compelling reason to get Windows 7. "As I researched this article, I actually found it difficult to put together a list of compelling features that might motivate someone to pay money and move," Kennedy wrote.
3. You'll need expensive hardware to run the minimum requirements, which are a 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor,1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit), 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit), and a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.
4. You have to wipe the old system from your machine and doing a fresh install of Windows 7, and—most important—reinstall all of your programs.
5. Your reinstalled programs may not run with Windows 7.  You can try troubleshooting options and resetting compatibility settings, but they may not work.

I've had a hard drive fail on me and I had to reinstall all my programs.  It was a laborious, tedious, aggravating, seemingly-endless chore. To turn me off on Windows 7, all I had to know was that an unnecessary program that required expensive hardware would require re-installation of my programs.

Kennedy speculated Windows 7 may be the last operating system released. "As people use the Internet for more applications, as in 'software as a service' or cloud computing, the browser becomes the most important software on a computer," he said.

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on January 01, 2010 (boomark / email).