Beancounters at analyst outfit Gartner have warned that it will take Windows 7 two years to defeat XP.

Gartner analyst Annette Jump said that Windows 7's biggest rival will remain XP for many years. She said that XP is still too popular on business desktops, something that Vista could not defeat. Jump said that with the recession meaning that many IT departments were faced with reduced IT budgets many would delay the widespread adoption of Windows 7 until 2012.

She thinks that we will not see mainstream adoption of Windows 7 by enterprise companies will not start until 2011. When this happens companies will do a “forklift migration” from XP straight to Windows 7. This date coincides with the next professional PC replacement cycle.

Part of the problem was the fact that Redmond will support Windows XP through to 2014. Some companies think that there is no reason to rush Windows 7 deployment.