Buyer picks Windows 7 as Microsoft's last desktop OS

James Gardner, chief technology officer (CTO) of the UK's Department of Work and Pensions has predicted Windows 7 will be the last desktop operating system large enterprise will choose to roll out.  

"I think it likely this is the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys," Gardner wrote on his personal blog on Monday. 

The DWP earlier this year signed a £200 million (AU$321 million) deal with Fujitsu to refresh and upgrade its140,000 desktops from Windows XP to Windows 7 - a deal celebrated by Fujitsu as the "single biggest desktop and thin client deal in the UK".  

But Gardner mused on his blog this week that Microsoft would need change tack on Windows to remain relevant in the enterprise. 

"The real question, I think, is what Microsoft will do to restore the value of Windows," he wrote. 

The age of piling once-discrete applications into the operating system was coming to an end, Gardner said.  

"That's obviously over because most of the action is now happening in the datacentre (or the cloud)," he said. 

Fujitsu, by chance, is Microsoft's middleman for migrating its enterprise customers to its Azure cloud.

The two vendors expanded an existing UK partnership on Thursday, inviting smaller UK and Irish independent software vendors to migrate their applications to Windows Azure.

Microsoft and Fujitsu announced their global Azure partnership in July, which took until October to rear its head in Australia.