Microsoft wants business customers - whose offices are chugging along nicely with the company's eight-year-old workhorse OS, Windows XP - to upgrade to Windows 7 now.

The firm pushed out a flurry of case studies and related happy-clappy stuff about Windows 7 yesterday, in a move to convince punters who previously turned their noses up at Vista, that now is the time to move on from XP.

"No need to wait - begin your Windows 7 deployment now!", pleaded Microsoft's Gavriella Schuster in a blog post yesterday.

In the real world, savvy businesses and organisations carefully bide their time before taking on a mammoth roll-out of a new operating system.

A painfully self-aware Microsoft of course recognises that there are plenty of IT departments around the globe whose sys admins will sit this one out for a while to see how well Windows 7 really performs in a live environment.

Indeed, many are likely to wait until the first service pack arrives, rather than rush to install a system that might - as tends to be a characteristic trait of Windows - have a few teething problems once out in the wild.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft disagrees with that notion. It feels super confident that now is the time to move on from XP, forget about the painful upgrade process users were shackled with when Vista rocked up, and get with the Windows 7 install program, people.

Yesterday, to underline its desire to release the tight grip volume-licensing customers have on their beloved XP machines, Microsoft spun out a host of research papers and case studies that all favoured an upgrade to Windows 7.

Of course, MS is also making the big Windows 7 push with corporate firms and large orgs in an effort to renew contracts, before old agreements expire and customers look elsewhere for their OS needs. ®