After taking a pass, in most cases, on Windows Vista small busineses are starting to seriously consider moving away from Windows XP and migrate to the new Windows 7 operating system, Microsoft Vice President Brad Brooks said in an interview on Tuesday.

"Windows Vista was a generation of the operating system that was passed up by small businesses; they stayed with XP," Brooks said. "We're seeing a lot of trends at retail that are telling us small businesses are starting to come back in the marketplace."

According to Brooks, office and electronics retailers are starting to stock more PCs with the professional version of Windows 7. "That's a good early indicator for us."

Earlier on Tuesday, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein noted that the company has now sold 90 million licenses of Windows 7, up from the more than 60 million it had sold as of the end of December.

"Windows 7 is growing incredibly fast right now for us," Brooks said, noting that the only electronics category that saw more sales in the holidays than Windows notebooks were flat-panel TVs.

Brooks said that while Microsoft continues its big advertising push for Windows 7, it is also seeing the kind of marketing it can't buy (and hasn't had for a while)--word of mouth.

"We are sitting in a very different position than where we have been in the last three years," he said.

John's take on it

As a user of the Windows 7 operating system, I have to add my two cents and say that I am very impressed with the OS overall, while it is not perfect, but what is, it is a very solid and much more stable OS than Microsoft has delivered in the past. I applaud their efforts and look forward to deploying the OS to more SMB desktops and laptops in teh coming months. I would estimate that at this point 70% of my OS repair request end up going in the direction of upgrading to Windows 7.