Microsoft Confuses Consumer on Updrade to Windows 7

This week is devoted to Windows 7, especially the upgrade to 7 from Vista. Suffered with Vista long enough? Ready to finally upgrade to a 21st-century operating system?

The long-anticipated release of Windows 7 has finally come and not without great fanfare, publicity and marketing campaigns across the web. The "launch-party" meme a well known viral web meme that has been circulating the internet the past couple weeks. The launch-part turned out being more humorous than successful for Microsoft. Users, confronted with the upgrade deployment, didn't take long to realize there was a huge problem with Windows 7.

There are two options for instillation of Windows 7: Clean-Install -or- In-Place Upgrade. If you are like most people, you want to upgrade to avoid wiping your hard drive and losing ALL of your programs! It appears as though the ability to upgrade to Windows 7 depends upon which version of Vista you had and which version of 7 you have.

What's worse? It appears that the upgrade paths are a deliberate attempt to require a certain action on behalf of users. Does this sound like a marketing gimmick to anyone else? This problem has been talked about before, here, here (by Techspot) and here by Microsoft.

Still don't believe me, take a look at this Chart showing all of the 66 possible upgrade options. This is a usability nightmare. It looks like Microsoft was too focused upon fixing the problems with Vista to see the problems they were creating with the deployment of Windows 7. Lesson learned: deployment is a significant aspect of usability.