I should point out what most of our enterprise clients have been doing since the advent of Vista; they have insisted on back-grade OS licenses. Then they have XP installed on machines from (Del//HP/IBM) and then eventually they'll upgrade if that day comes.
Time goes on, and now they are getting Win7Pro back-grade licenses with XP (still!) installed. I suspect that we will still be supporting XP on the managed services side for 3-6 years, regardless of when M$ sunsets XP.
I would add at the same time, I am actually seeing clients of 10+ years that I *never* thought would leave M$ choosing to go open source over cost issues. They are coming up on server hardware refresh time, and are virtualizing most of the existing servers in their small data-center (a few racks).
In virtualizing these servers, they are pricing Dell/HP rack servers along with 3 years NBD support, and they have separately priced VMWare, M$ Hyper-V, and commercial Zen. Once all the smoke cleared, they still want to go forward with the virtualization, but want to use Zen or KVM (both FOSS) to save all the optional software costs. Since we are virtualizing existing servers, we will move the Win2003 server lics onto the virtual hardware, and not have to rebuy server OSs.
So ..... in the struggling SMB market-segment, cost pressures are growing, and other software options are now considered viable. Most practices are now installing OpenOffice, and really don't notice the difference as long as their saved documents preferences are set correctly.
As far as Oracle, yes James, we were once even Oracle partners, but after one round with them and a major client, we ended the relationship. They remind me of NetWare or SCO back in the day.
