Microsoft may face resistance to Windows 8

[EmptyTimCup]

gezz they just announced they sold 240 mil license last yr for Win 7 ...... now they are talking Win 8 already ....... M$ needs to slow down and get on a 5 yr release cycle .......

Microsoft may face resistance to Windows 8
2012 release may mean upgrade fatigue for enterprises, say analysts




Computerworld - Enterprises now in the midst of migrating to Windows 7 are unlikely to repeat that same work in just two years with Windows 8, an analyst said today.

"They would certainly like to upgrade only to every other edition," said Michael Silver of Gartner, referring to businesses. "If Windows 8 comes out in two years, I think that's likely to happen, that many [enterprises] will be very suspect about migrating to the next release."

Silver's comments came after the Dutch arm of Microsoft announced that the follow-on to Windows -- dubbed "Windows 8" by most, if not by Microsoft -- will ship in two years, or in 2012.

That timeline fits earlier Microsoft statements that said Windows is on a three-year development plan.

The remark about Windows 8 -- "Microsoft is on course for the next version of Windows. But it will take about two years before 'Windows 8' [is] on the market," the Microsoft Netherlands blog stated Friday -- has since been scrubbed from the post. Tom Warren of Neowin.net was the first to report on the Dutch posting.

But the three-year development cycle that Microsoft seems committed to will present problems for companies, if not consumers.

Fatigue, for one thing, said Silver, who cited the slow uptake for Office XP, which appeared just two years after its predecessor, Office 2000, as an example. Companies tire of migrating to fast-paced operating system upgrades, largely because of the number of critical applications that may or may not run on a new edition.

That's one reason enterprises generally seem more willing to upgrade if the new version is a "minor" update, or one that doesn't introduce a new architecture, but resist a so-called "major" upgrade. That was one of the reasons why Vista never got traction in business, said Silver.

 

[GWguy]

We're only just now starting to release a corp version of Win7 to our customers. No way Win8 is in the sightline. The cost for licensing is too great for the number of clients, and each time they release a new OS, the hardware requirements change. We've just barely updated the hardware to be compliant with Win7. MS needs to take engineers off that program and put them on the software security team to clean up their existing code.

 

[EmptyTimCup]

yeah I had to budget for Win 7 Pro next yr


$25.000 for Memory Upgrades .... 4.500 for PC Software replacement for old software NLC (auto-cad is expensive) .... and 12.000 for System Replacement - for systems not good enough to run Win 7 or cannot handle 4 gb of memory


and lots of $$$ to re-write custom apps and html for web based apps

for IE 8 ...

 

[handsfull]

It's a shame the Linux desktop distributions aren't well supported for business applications. I use Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS at home and they are great free alternatives to using Windows as my operating system. However, without programs like MS Office, accounting programs, SAP and many other enterprise needs, the desktop will be relegated to the bloated, slow and memory/system intensive Microsoft operating systems.

Too bad companies are not investing heavily into a collaborative effort to create enterprise level open source applications that could be used across many enterprises with the interoperability along the lines of MS Office, but without the closed source proprietary systems and the stranglehold on system resources. If Linux operating systems could achieve the level of enterprise applications that it has achieved at the consumer/residential user level then I would expect a shift toward Linux as the desktop operating system for businesses (not just capitalizing the server market like it currently does). Linux is so much faster, efficient and capable than Windows and companies could invest their license and support costs into training and in-house support. And they could reduce overall operating costs at the same time by having lower system requirements to still gain superior speeds over Windows. As an example, my laptop running an older dual core Intel chip with only 1GB of RAM can run circles around my enterprise corporate system with 3GB RAM and a Core 2 Duo processor running Windows XP. And Windows 7 is even more resource hungry. And a system can last so many more years running Linux than Windows because the resource requirements are not growing exponentially with every release.

Off my soapbox for Linux, but every time I see articles about the costs businesses must budget just to run Windows and try to keep up until the OS is no longer supported seems ridiculous for such a wasteful operating system prone to so many different security issues.

 

[BOP]

As someone who saw the inception of the GUI, including DOS shell (some argue that that's not a GUI interface), I contend that there hasn't been anything new since 3.x. More glitz, maybe, but once you understand one, you can figure them all out. Until Windows 7. It's like the federal government: too big and unnecessarily complex. It's no longer as intuitive based on previous versions, and the Office suite is even more so (nonintuitive).

I'm waiting for the Windows version that prompts you to press (1) for English, (2) for Spanish.

 

[BOP]

It's a shame the Linux desktop distributions aren't well supported for business applications. I use Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS at home and they are great free alternatives to using Windows as my operating system..

I actually downloaded Ubuntu (still have a copy around here somewhere), but too many life changes and shear laziness kept me from installing it. Have you tried OpenOffice or any other windows emulating programs with it?

 

[jrt_ms1995]

I actually downloaded Ubuntu (still have a copy around here somewhere), but too many life changes and shear laziness kept me from installing it. Have you tried OpenOffice or any other windows emulating programs with it?

Give Linux Mint (or many other Linuxes) on a live-CD a try. No need to install anything as it will run from the disk. On most of these, like Mint, OpenOffice is the default office suite and you can try it out, too. Or you can just as easily install OpenOffice on a Windows system; that's what I use at home as I certainly am not going to pay for MS Office and will not steal it. It it wasn't for 17 years of Quicken data I'd abandon Windows (I just haven't learned to trust the Wine emulator enough yet).

There are ERP systems that run on Linux, but I've nothing to say on those things other than SAP is CRAP, and a reason to firebomb Germany again. Contraintuitiveobtusary.

 

[BOP]

Give Linux Mint (or many other Linuxes) on a live-CD a try. No need to install anything as it will run from the disk. On most of these, like Mint, OpenOffice is the default office suite and you can try it out, too. Or you can just as easily install OpenOffice on a Windows system; that's what I use at home as I certainly am not going to pay for MS Office and will not steal it. It it wasn't for 17 years of Quicken data I'd abandon Windows (I just haven't learned to trust the Wine emulator enough yet).

There are ERP systems that run on Linux, but I've nothing to say on those things other than SAP is CRAP, and a reason to firebomb Germany again. Contraintuitiveobtusary.

Somebody at work recomended Linux. I had a copy of redhat that I was playing with, but never got that deep into it.

SAP is worse that CRAP, and some stoop-nagle in the Navy bought off on it.