I am sure those ROI figures are correct for corporations and large businesses. The figures are very good for Microsoft's bottom line. but in my experience, small business often don't find that to be the case. Most of the apps I write are business solutions for companies with fewer than 25 employees (the vast majority are fewer than 10 employees.) Most of the apps employ office automation componenets. One client estimated that new hardware equipped with Windows 7 and Office 2007 reduced her business' productivity by half for at least 3 months. She singled out ribbon menus as being less logical/more arbitrary than their previous version of Office and features that were missing or worked differently in the OS as the major culprits. Larger businesses have IT departments and can offer employee training. Small businesses don't have those resources to help them with the steep learning curve.

Even medium-sized businesses may not reap immediate gains in productivity. A simple upgrade from Office 2007 to 2010, declared by Microsoft to be "transparent" and "fully backward compatible", went very wrong for one client in August. The upgrade was done over a weekend and by 7:01 am Monday, the entire network was down and would remain so for a day and a half--until Office 2007 could be restored. The undocumented change in Office 2010 was eventually located and and a work-around for it was devised, but that took 2 months.

In my experience new isn't always better and change for the sake of change rarely pays off :-) There are still a lot of XP workstations out there in my client base and I estimate they will be there for a while yet.