This is seriously Microsofts Windows 7 upgrade chart, and its ridiculous. It manages to highlight the insanity of shipping multiple OS versions while totally minimizing the good news: most Vista users will be able to upgrade in place to the corresponding 32- or 64-bit version of 7. That should cover the vast majority of people running Vista, but if youre still on XP or youre trying to do anything out of the ordinary youd better get ready for some pain: all those ominous blue boxes require you to back up, wipe your drive, and reinstall a totally clean copy of 7. You heard that right -- the Windows 7 installer wont even try to retain your data and programs if youre not updating from the corresponding version of Vista. Pretty lame move, considering Microsoft is currently selling millions of copies of XP on netbooks and will sell XP downgrades until 2011 -- sure, we get that most netbook owners arent going to spring for 7, but its insane that you cant just pop in a disc and upgrade. Of course, now that 7s been released to manufacturing and the final bits are available theres not much to be done, so lets all just take a moment to contemplate the fact that Ed Bott at ZDNet managed to totally outdo Redmonds infographics people with a much friendlier chart with "about an hour" of work -- check it below.
Original chart at AllThingsD
Ed Botts revised chart
