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Microsoft Trying To Woo Businesses To Windows 8
jfruh writes "Windows 8 is the most radical rewrite of Microsoft's operating system in decades — and most of the changes are aimed at consumers and new tablet form-factors. Meanwhile, corporate IT is deeply suspicious. Over at Microsoft TechEd Europe, the company is gamely trying to explain to enterprises why they should switch, with easy-to-write enterprise apps and the ability to stream server-side x86 apps to Windows RT. Not everyone is convinced."
We're still about a year away from mass deploying Windows 7 Enterprise with our upcoming lease swap. I highly doubt we'll even think about touching Windows 8 for a while after that. I have a better chance of getting laid in the next 5 years.
IT Departments are innately conservative. Doing something different can get you fired. It's the same thing that led to the "no one ever got fired for buying Windows" line in the '90s. Hell, IT Departments are just now beginning to get off of XP. A radical change like 8? It's not going to fly. Windows 8 needs to become "normal" to the IT Department before they'll allow it in. In fact, I bet it'll end up being a lot like Vista. IT will hold off until 9, when issues that crop up with Windows 8 have been ironed out.
Windows 8 VS AOL http://cdn.iwastesomuchtime.com/5192012043239windows8vsaol.jpeg
With radical rewrites come lots of new bugs - and lots of sysadmins whose years of experience may not translate. For corporate IT, both of those make Win8 a "go slow" proposition - at best.
#DeleteChrome
Microsoft Trying To Woo Businesses To Windows 8
Holy shit! Who could have guessed this would happen? Quick, somebody call the EFF, ACLU, and EU before it's too late!
Our IT guys have an agreement in their employment contract that they'd be executed if they brought that monstrosity anywhere near our computers. They're comfortable with that and suggested extending the same proviso to senior management.
I am going to have my team begin development on Win8 applications right away and push for hardware to test and develop on. Hopefully this will trickle down to the rest of the company and the IT staff.
that every business in the entire world would have enough sense to know that the corporate environment is not a place to be using the bleeding edge of software versions, no matter how much wooing they get.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
All of those things are at features or at least possible to do in windows 7 currently, so why upgrade? I would like to see REAL reasons! New file system? Better security model? Whatever. Otherwise its completely pointless. Regarding the simple UI model, well obviously that's a model of perspective. It wouldn't be difficult to develop an app that would look exactly the same on any existing system. In my opinion, its the Metro UI not the OS itself that is going to prevent enterprises from adopting w8. Sure it makes sense with a touch screen but the fact of the matter is, it is not efficient with a mouse and keyboard, even the desktop view is crippled. Like the author said, give the user the choice, and stop trying to force this metro UI garbage down every bodies throat. UI design is NOT a once size fits all endeavor!
And this article demonstrates why Linux is about to go all bukake all over Microsoft's face.
... it's amazing how Microsoft still doesn't really get it. Business doesn't really need Metro. There's entire indistries that still get their bread and butter from CLI-based apps (insurance and travel immediately come to mind as does various medical professions) so what advantage does 8 have for them? As stated in the article, unless there's a way to skip Metro all together, many helpdesk staffers will get pissed from fielding many calls asking "Where's my desktop at?".
Were I a CTO or even just an IT manager, I'd go for 7 on the next refresh and give 8 time to mature.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Who, or what 'Enterprise environment', would start over and rewrite their entire app catalog, in house or commercial, just for Windows 8 with it's 'radical rewrite'? Isn't this the next 'WindowsME'???
Silverlight? Going the way of the dodo. .Net? Going the way of the dodo.
What the hell is Microsoft talking about? Or more interestingly, what are they smoking at Redmond?
Moving to server-side heavy lifting for real-time Windows in 'Enterprise' environments.... to do what, read and reply to all my emails? Feed me inventory reports on how many widgets just shipped, to my Windows tablet in fancy non-webbased interface?
Sorry. Not seeing the trees here. Can someone point me to the forest?!?
Turning Windows into a Fisher Price toy is about the only possible way Balmer could have found to dismantle Microsoft's business monopoly in record time. I am impressed and the words "burning platform" come to mind.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
(nothing else to add)
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
Don't you get it? You've created a consumer OS. The same things that will make it more attractive to the average Joe are what will make it a non-starter in the business world. Why do you think Apple has never been able to gain a foothold in that market?
Let's be honest. This has been said with each new version of Windows. Personally, I was sure that Vista would be the opening that Linux needed to make serious inroads on the desktop, but I was wrong. Many thought that XP's Fisher Price looking default theme and clunky performance (initially) was enough to woo consumers over to Linux, but this didn't happen. I don't see it happening with Win8, especially if Microsoft relents and gives users a way to boot directly to the desktop instead of Metro.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Microsoft will have a tough sell when it comes to Win8 with many if not most of their large customers.
First all, while they are still the preferred desktop OS vendor, their reputation precedes them: new releases of Windows often come with a seemingly built-in period where problems and flaws need to be worked out -- most of the time by the first service pack, others, not until the second or later. That in turn means lowered productivity across the userbase and increased support costs. To make things worse, often times the answer from even the highest levels of Microsoft's support is "that will be fixed in the next service pack" and the problem is left open. Companies know this and have learned to wait.
Secondly, Microsoft has a bad habit of changing the way their OS works, and that leads to lower productivity thanks to users "having to look" for features and controls they previously knew how to find. Win7 did it, as did Vista and to a smaller extent XP. That even affects the support groups, as they too have to climb up a new learning curve. Companies have learned this too and often wait until they are familiar with the new OS -- sometimes using their own staff as guinea pigs for the desk-side support guys.
Finally, Microsoft's upgrades -- and anyone's really -- have a way of breaking legacy applications that are critical to the business's needs. Then there are vendors who have not certified the new Microsoft OS as being compatible with their products. No certification, no support. No support, it doesn't get fixed and that leaves the business without a piece of its business process software working correctly. Companies have learned this as well and have learned how to wait.
All in all, the conservatism of IT groups is a learned behavior, and if Microsoft has problems selling their OS upgrades because of this, a large part of it is their own doing.
I see help desk hell with the new GUI and even say you have some full screen metro apps the switching will be jarring to some people as well.
RT devices can't run x86 apps. Microsoft says "No problem! Use RemoteApp to stream x86 apps to your device!" But given how licenses work, this isn't saving you any money on software - and now you need two pieces of hardware (the remote device and a server) to run apps that used to live on the remote device.
So basically Microsoft's decisions created a new problem, and they're trying to pretend their work-around should count as a feature.
#DeleteChrome
good luck makeing windows 8 only Enterprise apps as that is likely to have a very small market when you can make the same app with out the metro stuff and have it run on XP, vista, 7 and windows 8.
Look, there's a mix of Win 7 32bit and 64bit distributions and the 32bit and 64 bit MS Office distros as well, some of which literally require you to recode macros into Visual Basic "just because".
We don't have time to add Win 8 just because some tablets might use it, especially since pretty much everyone is using iPad or iPhone instead.
Wake me up when Zune 2 is dead and the Tablet Wars are over - cause all my metrics show Apple is winning that one hands down, and we have to work with the VA, not some artificial version of reality where the Zune on steroids is a reasonable option.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I am dating win7 and she is good for me
She? Then how come MS customers are the ones bent over and taking it up the ass?
Or vagina.
I'm a IT Manager. I still have XP in my fleet because it still does everything we need it to do. MS got it right with XP, it has enough features to be useful, but not too much fluff to be painful. I still rate XP as the best desktop OS in existence (features, UI, compatibility, support). Vista and 7 just made corporate SOEs harder and more complex to implement. The Win8 UI looks great for tablets and phones, but doesn't look likely lend itself to productivity. In a corporate environment you generally have only a handful of apps which you use every day, some of which are custom written, and mostly you have multiple windows open side by side that you work with. I am yet to see this simple function demonstrated in Win8 which has me a little concerned.
1) I just spent two years testing Windows 7 deployment in our environment, learning the different behaviors of the OS, getting all the group policies & registry settings set exactly the way I want them, and familiarizing myself with the environment enough so that I can see in my head the system and its menus so that I can navigate myself and others through the system w/o hiccups. I don't make that kind of investment in my time to a new OS w/o wanting to wait at least three years before having to make a new change to our systems.
2) Windows is doing a near-complete overhaul to their OS. Last time this happened, we got Vista. Enough said.
3) Even when Windows 7 came about, I still waited a year before deploying it in our environment. SP1's for Windows OS's have had a good track record thus far.
Strapons? The flourishing Seattle BDSM and Femdom scenes?
Business doesn't like radical rewrites of the OS. People like MS because it's consistent. Everyone still isn't over the Windows vista/7 issue. No one is going to buy windows 8 especially since given the pattern Windows 8 will probably be terrible.
Lets face it...
98 good/ok
98 ME bad
XP Good
Vista bad
Windows 7 Good/ok
We're also not used to upgrading our OS this fast. There's no need for windows 8. People will be happy with windows 7 for years and years. Is that a profit problem for MS? How? They're collecting license fees on every new machine.
As to Metro, touch integration, etc. Careful with that stuff. Annoy enough people with the OS and you're going to get people to install alternative shells or completely jump ship to linux. We don't like radical changes like that. And most worrying MS is dropping a lot of it's backward compatibility. That's not acceptable. If I have to start running lots of custom VMs of windows just to run old software that won't work in new versions of MS. At some point there's no problem with just switching to linux or Mac. It's all the same at a certain point.
So... be careful.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It will do those things for another year and a half, until April 2014 when Microsoft has decided it doesn't want to support it any longer. By that point you'd best have upgraded or made it so the XP machines can't see the Internet & have hot glue in their USB ports so they can't get viruses that way either.
Keep up with the times or get left behind, gramps.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
... Or doesn't Metro make you think that it's a 2012 version of Packard Bell's Navigator for Win 3.x?
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
We're still mostly on XP, evaluated and decided to skip Vista, and are just now starting to deploy 7. This is because (pay attention, this is important) having the latest and greatest cutting edge bits on the desktop is waaaayyyyyy down on the list of things a business looks for in a personal computer environment. Reliability, (Windows 8 service pack zero? It is to laugh.) security (ditto), and compatibility (which is, oddly enough, at direct odds with the concept of "complete rewrite") are MUCH more important factors than having whatever MSFT thinks is the latest whiz-bang interface. It comes down to this: What worked yesterday is more likely to work today than something that came out today. Windows 8 may be, despite being an even numbered release, the greatest thing since sliced milk. But the responsible thing to do is wait and see, let someone else take the chances, and make the decision when the environment is proven. If that means MSFT doesn't meet their 4Q sales, then they should have known better.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It will do those things for another year and a half, until April 2014 when Microsoft has decided it doesn't want to support it any longer. By that point you'd best have upgraded or made it so the XP machines can't see the Internet & have hot glue in their USB ports so they can't get viruses that way either.
Keep up with the times or get left behind, gramps.
Sounds like you weren't around for Win2000 vs XP in the business space. It took quite a while for business to get off of Win2000 just like XP nowadays. If you look hard enough, you'll probably still find NT4 and 2000 machines running in mission critical roles even today.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
All those things you need for business continuity will start not working one by one. And then you will join the happy upgrader crowd and brag your ROI on the upgrade like everybody else. Again.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ok, clue me in. I really need to know this. Why would I make a Metro app, which only runs on Windows 8, especially a client/server app as described in TFA, when I can make a web app that runs in any environment that has a web browser? What is the percentage in coding to a single, specialized environment when everyone else in the world is coding using mature cross-platform web-based solutions. Wouldn't coding to Metro be a really good way to commit corporate suicide?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There are a lot of solutions for Linux, including Secure-Boot compatible ones:
- Like Canonical's attempt to pay to have a boot loader get signed with the same key as what is used to boot Windows, so any mobo able to secure boot Windows should be able to secure boot such a bootloader too, and from that point onward boot any kernel (ubuntu official, custom or whatever) or even boot manager that the user would like to.
- And canonical's hope to also have its own keys accepted into as many motherboard as possible thus enabling them to start a more open-source firendly key infrastructure. (I.e.: lots of enthousiat mobo being also able to boot canonical signed code. Boot loader, straight kernels, whatever).
They are a lot less options for secure-booting Windows XP:
- Microsoft is NOT going to sign Windows' boot loader or whatever. I mean XP isn't even designed to boot on UEFI anyway ! And they have all the reasons to restrict secure boot to Windows 8 only.
- The only secure-boot compatible alternative would be to use a mobo with caninocal keys and either get SeaBIOS (a bios implementation to boot BIOS based OSes like Windows) signed, or use a signed bootloader and convert the SeaBIOS as a possible boot target for that. That's a lot of custom hacking. Enterprise IT department aren't going to like it.
Or disable secure-booting and either activate legacy BOOTing (if supported) or boot into a BIOS compatibility layer (like SeaBIOS):
- but you don't know for how long a legacy BIOS booting will be available (currently major recent OS from Microsoft support EFI booting, as do linux)
although currently non-secure-boot is possible and mandated for x86 hardware (but not supported by XP).
So in short:
There are way to get Linux working - even all the while keeping secureboot enabled.
Microsoft won't be helping for ways to get XP booting.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I am the IT manager at the company I work for, and am the one responsible for the server infrastructure and ~150 client computers
The only thing keeping us on Windows at work is due to our highly specialized and highly expensive ERP system, which runs most all aspects of the business.
If this system had an update released tomorrow that gave it Linux support, or even Mac support, I would ditch Windows like the bad habit it is faster than you could double-click.
The ERP company literally just released an update to allow the client to run on Windows 7 and not fall on its face on a 64 bit OS. 6 months ago now.
I began our XP to 7 migration plan a while before that, but with this rather critical dependency those plans have been on hold until January.
After putting in all the capital expenditure and purchase order requests to update our 5-6 year old Win2003 servers, I only last month got approval.
I'm not expecting to get the hardware for another 2-3 weeks. I'm expecting the ERP upgrade to take longer to fully test than I am the Windows 7 upgrade.
After all of this, I am not about to even listen to, let alone consider, how "easy" it is for enterprise software to be written for Win 8. That does not help with our million and a quarter dollar investment in existing software. I'm not about to replace last years 23" wide screen LCDs with new touch screens, especially so when our primary use is data entry. And I'm most certainly not looking forward to tossing out a decade of knowledge and learning experiences for Windows 8.
On that last point, while I fully expect to be playing around with and learning Windows 8 on my own, one thing that needs firmly kept in mind is that the company I work for does electronics manufacturing. Nearly no one is or has interest in the technicals of computers. They just prefer computers over pen paper and calculators. We even have a whole department of 30 people, of which only TWO own computers at home. (Yes this is as boggling to me as it no doubt is to you, especially in this day and age!)
These are not people who use computers purely for the sake of using computers, like we are. To them they are just tools to get work done easier and quicker.
Anything that distracts from that simple and only goal is not a benefit to us, and Win 8 falls firmly in that category.
I am not in any way looking forward to the re-training Windows 8 would require ON TOP OF the training for the new ERP update, which we already have to do.
Point being, Windows 8 is nothing but a bunch of time and money that does not benefit me or our company in any additional way than XP has and 7 will for some time to come.
Even if it was free software, my time would be better spent elsewhere, that would more than likely end up saving us time and/or money, if not actively making us money.
Windows 8 doesn't bring anything to the table we want. While not all businesses are the same, I think Microsoft is about to be surprised by how many are similar in this regard.
No, the GP is right. Microsoft has kept XP around for as long as they are going to. Once Security updates stop, people will switch. Well, people who want to keep their jobs will switch.
IT departments are only just shifting to Windows 7. And they're only doing that because PCs are coming with more than 3GB of memory.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I would like to see REAL reasons!
Guest post by Mary-Jo Enderle
BORG CUBE, RedMonk, Tuesday (NNGadget) — I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.
I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! — the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!
The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable "tilt bits," which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.
A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There's just no way that Steve "Trains Run On Time" Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day — the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets — in the shade.
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.
Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!
I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Of course I was. We got rid of our Win2K and NT4 machines in time, except for one or two that run scientific instruments; these are off the Internet. Having a site license for Windows upgrades is pretty damn nifty.
You want obsolete? I inherited an area with two computers that were used solely to automatically SSH into an intranet administrative server and enter data. Guess what operating system they were running in 2005.
It was MS-DOS, and they weren't replaced until summer 2006. Given the sheer obsolescence and limitations of the operating system, I would actually be fine with them being in service for that one limited purpose today. DOS was so simple that it was easy to delete any non-needed executable, so you could be pretty sure there wasn't anything in there besides IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM, the TCP/IP stack & 3Com driver, and the SSH2 program itself.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Always trying to do my part to remind people of the hell we once came from.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Everyone allows iPhones and iPads on their corporate net.
According to InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, and GCN, something like 80 percent of all large to mid size firms either are doing that or are about to do that.
The war is over. Apple won.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I still have my laptop from 2006 and it still does everything my brand new one does, it even has higher res screen.
I'll echo what you said, I have both a 2006 Macbook and Mac Mini - they are both doing incredibly well - albeit with shiny new SSDs
In fact, I'd bet my 2006 devices are faster than many currently selling desktop/laptops that don't also have an SSD for mundane tasks like booting the OS, browsing and moving files around (yeah, their video cards don't quite support HD streams without stuttering but that's what tablets and roku/appetvs are for nowadays).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The next big enterprise OS is going to be . . . wait for it . . . MICROSOFT! Win 8 may or may not be accepted by enterprises. If it does lay an egg, do you really think CIOs are going to say "Well Win8 is no good - let's drop MS and switch to $(MacOS/Linux/whatever)"? Nope, it'll be "We'll wait for Win 9". And when MS hears that, Win 9 (or 10 or 11) will get pushed to open beta really damn quick. In the meantime enterprises will keep right on issuing purchase orders for whatever their preferred flavor of Windows is.
Almost no one is convinced.
Windows doesn't exactly have a good track record with new software, especially new software who's sole purpose seems to be to create MS lock-in, (which most companies are just barely recovering from).
Most companies keep a generation or two behind the times as it is. I know companies still using 2000, with NO INTEREST IN CHANGING. 8 is way too big of a step. Someone has to slap some sense into MS; they need to wait unitl everyone, (or at least some), have caught up before shoving a new OS down their throats.
Apparently they don't remember Vista, no one wanted it, FROM THE VERY DAY THEY STARTED DEVELOPMENT, and they lost a fortune, and, worse, the MS monopoly.
It's not likely that the Canonical boot loader will allow chain loading XP.
True.
Any signed UEFI boot loader that boots an unsigned operating system will be doing so under threat of their own key being blacklisted.
That *IS* the point of the boot-loader. Being signed (so secure-boot can accept it), but being able to chain load anything the user want (custom kernel or even GRUB boot manager).
The problem lies elsewhere:
- Windows XP is *not* designed to boot from an UEFI firmware, but from BIOS. Which is not available in UEFI boot modes (and might completely disappear in the near future). And microsoft will probably never release a UEFI-enabled Windows XP. So no way to get it to boot on a UEFI machine.
- Also Windows XP in neither a linux-like bootable kernel, so no chance of it being directly chainable from a efilinux boot loader.
To get it to boot:
- either some BIOS compatibility layer has to be used like SeaBIOS (which isn't currently able to emulated everything needed for Windows XP as far as I know) and make that chainloadable by the boot loader. (that is the route that Apple went with BootCamp on Mac hardware, they install a compatibility layer above their own custom variant of EFI that gives enough BIOS functionnality to help Windows Boot).
- or hack ReactOS's osloader (which *IS* bootable from any Linux bootloader) to be able to load windows XP components and boot them. (ReactOS is supposed to be NT-Like, so that not impossible, but requires tremendous work)
So, in short, no easy way to chainload Windows XP from efilinux. Not because of security or signing, but because XP isn't designed to run on such a system, Microsoft won't do anything for that, and any other solution around the problem requires lot of hacking.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In most offices environments, PCs with Windows Vista or Windows 7 are used for MS Office (or some other word processor, email, and calendar suite), web browsing (or accessing company internal web applications), and sometimes other little job or company specific utilities. Windows 8 doesn’t do any of that better, so there’s very little reason for IT organizations to push their companies to adopt Windows 8. What will they say? “The file copy dialogue box is better, and it will be more secure on devices that have an EFI feature your computer doesn’t have, so please accept long periods of downtime and relearn how to use a computer to do simple tasks while meeting your quarterly goals”?
The feature of note for Windows 8 is the ability to run on small, touchscreen devices. None of these new devices have been seen in their shipping form, businesses don’t have any running a previous version of Windows and that will need to be upgraded. The only small, touchscreen devices that business and entrepreneurs have deployed is the iPad*, and it won’t run Windows 8.
Microsoft’s sales office may be looking to license as many Windows 8 keys as it can, perhaps to create the impression of a successful launch. But the adoption of Windows 8 on PCs won’t determine the success of Windows 8, the adoption in the “post PC world” will.
What's the difference between chainloading XP and your own kernel?
your own kernel does support UEFI and does support being loaded and booted from efilinux, grub2, etc.
chainloading XP would require a Legagy BIOS which isn't available at that point. Also the Windows kernel doesn't conform to the standard used by efilinux and other bootloaders so it can't be loaded from the. Currently bootloader chainload to windows XP by loading its boot sector and acting as if that (MSDOS) partition was booted. But UEFI has no concept of boot sectors or MSDOS partition (only GPT partitions).
windows xp it self is un-bootable of such a machine without extensive hacking.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I don't know. With Mac OS you can bypass the UI stuff designed for people who don't type and go straight to a terminal window. Nothing on Windows comes close to having the ease of use of a decent Unix command line, even Cygwin feels slow and bulky as it tries to wrestle win32 into submission. Of course straight up Unix would be even better than MacOS but at this point in time too many companies still feel compelled to have Outlook and Exchange Sever compatibility.
Of course they get it. You don't get to be the largest software company on the planet from being stupid. But what are they going to do? Sit on their hands? They've got to offer something new, regardless of whether or not everybody buys it. We're still happily plugging along with XP, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Actually, by the time we dump XP, we might even skip 7, and go right to 8.
XP was a very nice upgrade to W2K though. NT4 was nice, but W2K just felt slow in comparison. XP actually gave a reason to upgrade, which Vista and W7 have not really done.
Dude. The desktop works the same as always. A desktop... a taskbar... min/max/resize buttons... they're all there. Desktop apps run the same as always with the same interface as always. You can run as many as you want at once. You can juggle as many windows as you want.
The only thing that should concern you is that you are (allegedly) an IT manager and yet you appear to be completely and utterly clueless as to what the next version of Windows can do. That's some serious incompetence.
Your complaint would only be valid if your business used only Metro apps. ...which it won't. PLus, Metro apps already support two-windows at once.
I hope you any everyone voting you up educates themself because you just look foolish.
The odd thing to me is that they just can't compromise and allow for a Start Menu on the desktop. It isn't like this is a new product, they have a significant existing user base. Just have an option. Maybe right click the taskbar and the properties dialog has a "Show Start Menu" option. That alone would be huge.
The funny thing I think is that one of the reasons Windows Mobile 6.x sucked was the insistence on the Start Menu paradigm. But now to have a more mobile friendly interface they kill the start menu on PC's.
for business. Businesses often require locked down computers and need to control their data in their local jurisdiction. Many of the apps channel users to the 'cloud', and much functionality does not seem to work without a 'cloud' account. The Metro file browser seems to require a cloud login just to access files in local external storage which is just ridiculous.
The 'cloud' requirment is also a problem for families. Children can not even download game apps without an email account, and how can they be expected to agree to the terms?
What about apps that business would like to use but that are outside MS's app store terms? Sorry business can have their systems ruled by the whims of MSs terms.
Some apps have a lot of consumer marketing in them, such as the the Videos app, which seem to have a fixed home page advertising consumer Videos for sale. This is all an unproductive distraction for business.
Then there is the push to the touch screen UI. This does not even suit a wide range of consumer devices. For example a remote control better suits a TV. Business need very effecient and ergonomic input devices for people working long productive hours. Even if my monitor was touch sensitive I would still be using the trackball because I can work longer hours before becoming fatigued, and the Metro UI is very frustrating to use with a trackball because buttons and scroll bars are far apart. The simple fact is that a pull down menu is much more efficient and productive for trackball and mouse usage.
Pinching to zoom, and swiping to pan, may not even be a great interface and may not be around long. I would much rather have some wheels around the tablet edge. Then there are the creative multi-touch gestures - pick with one touch and pan with another - but which hand is holding the tablet?
Further, the 'no chrome' UI, is just not intuitive. Where is the help? What are the shortcuts? Why do we need to search online just to learn how to close an app. I still haven't found the keyboard shortcuts for panning the grid UI? Perhaps people need the help that chrome can provide much more than they need the full screen content.
Windows 8 should have worked on security and isolation, not experimental UI and consumer consumption, if it wanted to appeal to businesses. How about tacking the problem of making cloud storage safe for businesses - encrpyted and split across multi jurisdictions! How about virtualising the OS environment so old applications can continue to run safely in virtual machines while not interfering with new OSs. How about bundling older MS OSs in the virtual environment - this is something only MS could do so why not exploit the opertunity? These are the things businesses need. It would also be great for families - children could install junk games etc in a locked down virtual machine and just wipe it all when done.
powershell run circles around bash if you happen to think in a OO fashion
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Microsoft really can't win. People blame them for being stagnant and holding the world back in an old Desktop/Wintel/PC model, then when they do something new they get blamed for changing things too much. Then you get the Linux types who say Microsoft should concentrate on "fixing" Windows rather than advance/change it...even though they never really say what is broken about Windows. The corp world will be able to keep installing Win7, which is a perfectly good OS, for some time, so they have nothing to worry about. MS is looking to the future with Win8 because they see that devices are changing/converging and the lines are becoming blurred with device convergence. They are not radically rewriting the OS, it is still based on the same kernel generation as Vista and Win7, probably many drivers will work between all three as they often do now between Vista and Win7.
MS may well be prepared to take some pain with Win8. The issues with Vista led to Win7 which is a perfect replacement for XP. Win8 may be a similar stepping stone with long term payoff. It certainly will make x86 tablets more powerful than the crippled iOS based iPad, and Phone 8 will be NT based. Running NT both the tablet as a general platform and Windows Phone may well crack the corp market in the future.
With Win8 MS also has an opportunity to maintain the Home/Work monopoly of Windows. People wanted Windows at home because they used it at work (and it was cheaper than Mac). The braver home users have been moving slowly over to the more sexy OSX and the general Apple eco system. I even know .NET developers who don't even have a WIndows PC at home. Win8 may well help to counter this by making Windows sexy again. With backwards compatabiliy maintained in the workplace MS can help maintain the symbiotic relationship.
I have a hard enough time telling people how to open control panel or the printers section in windows using keyboard shortcuts and CPL commands, I can't imagine having them use this completely useless navigation system.
I really don't understand why MS always tries to change what we know. Why can't they stop moving things around and decide on a file structure and basic command structure that NEVER changes?
... many helpdesk staffers will get pissed from fielding many calls asking "Where's my desktop at?"
I think we can all agree that ending a sentence with a prpositiom is poor form, but it's hardly a reason to get pissed.
Did you know that "strap-on" spelled backwards is "no parts"? Seems appropriate, eh?
Why would any business go for a platform intentionally designed for a passive consumer mass market over increasing user productivity?
The world is still recovering from the countless billions of hours of lost productivity caused by bundling mine sweeper and solitaire with windows no need to pour salt on our wounds with crap like metro.
You wouldn't know that to listen to the people who howled about how terrible XP was & 2K was the best ever & they were going to stick with 2K forever &c&c.
The human brain is a funny old thing.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Our copy of the Windows 8 RC? Right in the trash. First its missing the start orb/button. Metro is going to confuse my already confused users. Second we have software still running on Windows 2000, and the main software we use is only good on XP. Third we are halfway to upgrading to Windows 7, and won't go to 8 unless we would need to rebuild the entire infrastructure from scratch (thank god for the DR site). Fourth Metro tiles are useless without Metro apps, and again we still have Office 2003 on some of our machines, and 2007 Communicator on half and Lync on the other half. Fifth, we will probably go to Server 2012 before we go to 8, thats a definite, we're already testing that,
Windows 8 will not be a tradition desktop OS. It will be an app platform for the desktop. All apps will have to be sold through Microsoft and MS will get their cut. But this also means all apps will be signed by Microsoft and apps will be revocable. So all malware will have to go through MS and they will subject everything to their standards.
No more viruses, no more trojans. Everything with a documented license though Microsoft. There might be few 0 day exploits now and again but it will be now and again but overall a 99.999% improvement.
For businesses and grandmothers alike this will be a good thing.
Enthusiasts will still root their machine but for the most part they will move on to running Linux and Windows side by side in a hypervisor. And a couple years later Apple will start selling OSX targeted to a hypervisors and generic PC hardware because their app store will make more selling software than hardware.
Most IT depts are rolling out Windows 7 and Office 2010 now. There is no way they are going to allow Windows 8 until it's has one or two service pack releases. Most will wait until Windows 9 or whatever it's called.
I've had Windows 7 for a few years because of our MSDN license. But since I can rebuild my own laptop and add it to the domain I am the exception. No IT dept is going to accept getting desktop support calls for a new Windows 8 interface.
Microsoft decided to go the consumer route. Nobody in business needs Windows 8 for the desktop, so it's going to get slammed.
I think XP all of the sudden being the best thing that ever happened was the result of Vista. Worse slashdotters kept repeating that Windows 7 = VISTA SP 2!
Say it enough and the brain now thinks XP is ROCK SOLID and best OS EVER. These same users are whinning they have to leave Xp in 2014. Good brother and by then you can't buy Windows 7 at the local retailer anymore at that point and will be stuck with Windows 8.
http://saveie6.com/
Microsoft's UEFI Secure Boot is never going to happen period, That would give MS total control over every future computer in the world they would hold the world to ransom. Do you lot never read the IT news, Microsoft have just lost their appeal case in the Europe courts for refusing to hand over their server code to their competitors, It's cost them $1.6 billion in fines Do you think governments like Russia who have dumped windows are moving all government departments schools and universities to their own Linux distribution, Turkish government and education departments who use Pardus Linux, Pakistan government and education department who have handed out 250,000 laptops to their students using Ubuntu Linux, south Africa starting One Laptop Per Child. China how have their own Linux distribution development Deepin. French national police who use Mandrive Linux. US Navy use Linux, NASA space labs use Linux, US senate use Linux, The worlds financial markets use Linux, Microsoft have lost their monopoly. Linux is far to big now for Microsoft to do anything about it, through they keep plugging away to get their monopoly back. Their monopoly has gone for forever that's a thing of the passed,
Win 8 haters insist that Win 8 is nothing more than Win 7 + Metro.
That's simply false. What do you want from an OS upgrade?
Faster? Check.
Uses less power? Check.
Better security and encryption options? Check.
Write once, run on any Win 8 desktop or tablet (and possibly phone)? Check.
I could go on and on. There are so many improvements to Win 8. Why do you ignore all of them? Honestly, posts like yours are pure FUD.
You are right ... but it has METRO. Aero is gone which was one of the coolest things about Vista/7 and is crippled as is instant search over using the mouse in all programs and other things.
It is dead to me until Windows 9 fixes it. ... we hope
http://saveie6.com/
Bullsh*t. Windows upgrades happen for a number of reasons, but the #1 reason they don't is if IT doesn't consider it a "upgrade." Which is what Windows 8 is falling short of here -> we've had developer / consumer previews, and aside from the MS marketing team (hi guys), we're giving it a thumbs down.
But then there's enough marketing types trying to push this product that I doubt MS is even aware of the problem (300,000 enthusiastic IT people looking forward to Windows 8, who are mostly shills / actually marketing trying to drum up support for the new product, plays havoc with polls).
And yes, I would know -> I've been playing admin since NT 4.0, have been around for the big Windows 2000 roll-outs, and have watched MS do some pretty dumb things.
I am John Hurt.
windows 7 will need to get a signed loader as well or just use the windows 8 loader to boot 7
#1: Two years testing an OS? You sound like an asshole.
#2: They are not doing an overhaul, they are changing the initial GUI experience. Win 8 isn't MinWin. THAT would be an overhaul.
#3 What? You ARE an asshole. Make up your mind.
I like windows 8. How do you like it? Or you prefer vista?
womens sexy lingerie |
8 hasn't yet shipped and hasn't proven itself capable of running "real business stuff" and they already want to cram it down the throats of corporate buyers?
Where I work, our IT team is still slowly migrating to Windows 7, having only recently halted Vista installs. New PCs are all Windows 7. Because we're more interested in having employees get billable work done instead of calling for IT support because some app is broken. Where it's been deployed, 7 is working fine. Our workers know how to use it. No issues.
I've played with 8. It seems geared for people who have never learned how to use Windows -except all of us worker bees have, in fact, done that. Our jobs depend on doing work. Not doing work differently, with tiles. Just because someone decided that was the way to go. I am sure it's a fine OS and there are valid reasons for every change. But we don't want change. At all. 7 works. Why change?
Frankly, a lot of people are still unhappy with the whimsical way Office 2007 and 2010 moved things around. They're trying to compose a document and can't find the control they used to be able to find. They are wasting time sorting it out and getting upset. The user impression -correct or not- is that stuff changed in Office just for kicks. And if they got their hands on 8, where stuff is "just changed" we would expect the same complaints.
With that in mind, and once again because Windows 7 is just pretty darn good, we're not looking seriously at 8. Maybe 9. We think we can hold on for that long, barring some sort of 8 miracle feature we've yet to hear about.
In my personal home network is four PCs running 7 and one Mac. Outside of a VM to play with, 8 doesn't fit with what I need or want to do. Shrug.
Sig for hire.
And a poor one at that, I feel sorry for any developers working for you that have to use that pos OS when they could be on Win7. I swear 80% of all IT Managers are fucking imbeciles.
If you don't mind me asking, which browser are you deploying on those XP images?
My company just finished replacing the last of the Windows XP machines with Windows 7. We are still in the process of moving users off of Office 2007 and on to 2010...(Though we still have some Windows XP Embeded devices in the field. - Kiosks)
We expect to be on Windows 7 Enterprise for the next 4 to 5 years at least. The cost of migrating a whole organization and verifying our applications is emense and not something we are looking to do again anytime soon. This means we will most likely skip Windows 8 completely.
Our company has been a mostly Microsoft house for longer than anyone on my team has worked there. Though over the last year we have started seeing the introduction of Mac's and Ipad's for use by management and some of the engineers. After reviews of the Windows 8 preview editions we've been asked for "alternatives" to Microsoft 5 years down the road.
Some companies will always stay with Microsoft, but others will finally bolt to other OS's. Especially considering more and more applications are becoming web based. A user with a Linux PC can access the same applications over the web a Windows or Mac user can... The proliferation of Web Apps is diminishing the relevance of the OS of the client machine.
I foresee a locked-down Win8 install that exists only to run WinXP or Win7 in a virtual machine.
We allow them but that doesn't mean they work, have to deal with constant complaints and helpdesk requests that exist solely due to Apple not making their devices and applications compatable with corporate networks and firewalls.
but at this point in time too many companies still feel compelled to have Outlook and Exchange Sever compatibility.
Maybe because Exchange and Outlook and head and shoulders above the competition for messaging/collaboration (or whatever category they call it nowadays)? Seriously, when is someone going to try and compete in that space? Nothing else even comes close (and don't even try to argue with this).
I'm not sure how much support we may end up providing for iPhones (currently none) - the Blackberries will need replacing soon, but no idea what with yet - could be WP7.8 or WP8...
Problem is that they compete either as mailers, or as calendar programs, but rarely together. Plus a lot of companies have locked themselves into Exchange by having Exchange specific features added, integration with other Office tools, integration with SharePoint, etc. To switch to a new product it doesn't matter how good the alternative is you still have to scrap the back office server apps too and that's a lot of inertia to overcome.
I'd say the thing about XP was that it became the OS that "did enough", before then we always lapped up every upgrade, every time. There were always good reasons to upgrade. When XP came out, there suddenly wasn't much of a reason, computing had grown up somewhat and had become mature enough to start using it for real-world work, rather than have one around almost as an end in itself.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We are current in the middle of changing from XP to Windows 7.. and even that is being done at extreme reluctance. It will be another 2 years before the last XP desktop is taken offline. Nothing is going to happen in the desktop space, other than upgrades, for 2 or 3 years after that. At the rate we are going, it will take for Windows 7 to be retired before we even think about upgrading. This is only 50K or so desktops...
XP really sucked. It was faster than NT but insecure and wasn't much bigger than NT. The speed was touted, not the security. Then the first update closed some of the holes, made it slower and bigger. Then SP2 and many closed holes made it secure enough, but bloated and slow. SP3 added some bells and shit, not really sure. But it seems at that point XP became good for businesses at least. Partly because CPUs had become even faster quicker than XP got slower and memory cost dropped quicker than XP bloated.
Vista was touted as faster than XP.
See what happened when XP was launched...
Windows 8 is a way to lock consumers into Bing and drive web traffic to it. You have to really hunt to set up a local logon - the default is Bing logon. This is an attempt to monetize the Windows user base, much like K-Mart monetizes their customers with "rewards" cards that build sucker lists to sell to credit card companies. Why is this not a big new story? Win8 is the K-Mart of operating systems.
Windows 8 doesn't matter - businesses will skip it. I predict Windows 9 will have "consumer" and "business" editions, where the consumer edition runs Bing apps and the business edition (priced to where consumers can't afford it, like first-release video tapes used to be so only rental stores would buy them) will run legacy apps. Windows 9 consumer edition might not even have .NET runtime available.
So where does that leave developers? In the future, I don't think much software will need to be developed. Pretty soon only licensed developers (ie pay a lot of money) will be able to develop for desktops. Apple and MS don't want you competing with them in their walled garden. Only approved apps from big media content corporations will be allowed on desktops. The change from general-purpose computing to content consumption will be complete by Windows 9. Only approved, licensed apps will be available in app stores for people to buy. No more off the shelf or custom written software.
So a few developers will work for MS and Apple, and a few developers will work for consultants who give big-media their content consumption apps. Otherwise, there won't be much software to write.
A few of us will still work with mainframes and J2EE - with the lockdown of the desktop, business workflow apps will all be done in J2EE and run in browsers.
I would say at least we have Linux, but with Gnome 3 and Unity that's not a good thing. I just hope KDE is never ruined. Maybe I'll go back to twm if it is.
Posting AC, due to previous mods.
We have a heap of users that just sit there entering data. High volumes of data. These guys hardly touch the mouse - just digits, characters, tab and enter. Occasionally they switch apps and screens, These guys are the content creators. Metro is just going to be a PITA for these guys. And these guys are never, ever, ever, ever going to use a tablet to do this.
Managers, that just play with pretty excel, powerpoint or word documents, Metro won't be used ... data presentation will be web based and then they can use any damn tablet they like. .sig
The user formerly known as nosfucious.
... it's amazing how Microsoft still doesn't really get it. Business doesn't really need Metro. There's entire indistries [sic] that...
sed -e 's/Business/The world/g'
Fixed.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Microsoft gets it fine. They understand that's their customer's attitude in enterprise. They just have to navigate that attitude while trying to use their existing leverage to adopt to the next generation of technology. They don't want Android/iOS to do to them what they did to IBM/Unisys/DEC...
I'm still running 2K you insensitive clod!
Write once run anywhere? Don't we already have that with Java (ducks)?
And it will go over about as well with Metro. For starters, your runs on any Win8 phone feature is meaningless when nobody runs Windows on their phone. There is no dominant OS on phones, and iOS is the dominant tablet OS right now (though it remains to be seen if the tablet market becomes a repeat of the phone market - early mover advantage followed by diversification).
If you want your app to run on everything better use tools that work across OSes made by more than one manufacturer. That either means html+javascript, or an app written in some kind of toolkit like QT/etc.
They're allowed, but they're not used for much more than reading email and such. It isn't like they can run the 40 bazillion IE-only apps in use.
"Because otherwise you might eventually get ideas about installing Linux in your machines, and we can't have that."
Die, microsoft, die, before Access happens all over again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ridiculous. People will only switch off of XP when they are forced to do so. Did the lack of security updates stop people from using MS-DOS 6.22? No. Neither will they switch off of XP.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The human brain is a funny old thing.
So is society. We treat people like idiots for making mistakes. So they defend their mistakes to the death, pretending they were wise decisions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We have been rolling Windows 8 out to a few of our select clients here in New York City. If your interested in having your company upgraded, contact us at http://www.DAGTech.com
You're the clueless one here. Please, don't interrupt the adults.
You can barely write... I think that says a lot about you and your opinion with regards to Windows 8. Go play with your new toy, consumer.
Windows 8 is the most radical rewrite of Microsoft's operating system in decades
If by radical you mean they piled entirely the wrong interface on top of an otherwise competent service release of Windows, then yes. It's radical. There are some things in Windows 8 that are okay. But as a business user, I would have been happy with Windows 7.5. Metro is awful, it's distracting, and it's bad for productivity.
This signature intentionally left blank.
The way our IT dept views it (fortune 500, billion dollar a year company) is like this: eat shit and fuck you.
We still have workstations running XP because the shit still works just fine. We're slowly migrating to 7. Very slowly. We're at about 70/30 7/XP. Whether or not it's the case, the way it's being talked about makes Windows 8 sound like it's only going to be good for tablets and phones 'n shit we sure as fucking hell aren't going to start running an enormous financial company on tablets and Nokias. No, no, no. Most of our workstations have 2 monitors just so people can see the huge spreadsheets that they need to use, all at once. Even if it works well on a desktop, it does not do a single thing that we need it to do that Windows 7 and even fucking XP don't already do. We've got about 18,000 workstations going at any given time.
The only way I would ever personally use Windows 8 is if I could dual-boot it along with Android on my phone. But I can't.
Miss.
It's not technically impossible. It's just not designed for that. It will require some hacking.
And the traditional stronghold for older versions (IT department in Business) are rather frisky when it comes to complex non-official, non-supported hacks.
As a proff, just look the reverse situation: booting the (custom)-EFI dependant Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware isn't impossible, but it requires quite a lot of hacking. (a Mac-EFI compatibility layer sitting above the BIOS, and patching the kernel with drivers for hardware which doesn't exist on Apple configurations but is required to have the machine work). Some of this can be automated with installers, or pre-patched images.
But how widely are hackintoshes deployed in enterprise? Not much...
Yup there's a difference between "definitely impossible" and "hackable".
but there's also a difference between "hackable" and "enterprise-ready/-friendly".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I know. But: How many chameleon-powered BIOS-running hackintoshes are currently deployed in enterprises? Not much.
The traditional stronghold for older version of windows, the enterpise, isn't that much friendly to hacks (even if it would be hackable. Either going the SeaBIOS way or the ReactOS osloader route).
So enterprises are between a rock and a hard place:
- either start using a lot of unofficial unsupported hacks to get Windows XP running on a SecureBoot machine.
- or quit the Windows XP they have been getting used to, and move to some newer uneasy waters like Windows 8.
- or stop using shitty "big enterprise brand" cheap boxes and hunt the component for custom built or switch to more expensive enthousiast machine where Secure Boot can be disabled, legacy BIOS boot can be enabled and MSDOS-partitionned (as opposed to GPT-partitionned) harddisk drivers are featured.
3 solutions, each of the 3 much hated by conservative enterprise IT departments.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The reason it's called "Secure" boot is that it solves the marginal problem of having malware install itself in memory before the OS even starts to load. If malware could install the Ubuntu bootloader and then chainload itself, there wouldn't be any point to "secure boot" at all
(I'm ignoring the fact that efilinux is currently designed only to load kernels (and boot utility) that follow certain specific convention, or eventually a boot manager that follow the same convention. and that windows 8 isn't well designed to boot in such an envrionment)
Or it could gain admin access using some Windows exploit, then disable secure boot in BIOS settings, install itself before the OS and then patch the OS to pretend that the environment is secure. Or a thousand of different other situation.
If current smartphones (iOS, locked Androids, etc.) are any indication, there is no such thing as a secure boot procedure. Only a (short) delay until an exploit is found.
Secure Boot is practically just some stupid snake oil, just a "security-theatre".
The problem is that it's infused with buzzword which please the management and you can pretty much be sure that big enterprises, the Pointy-haired-boss will want secure-boot enabled machines. And you can pretty much be sure that "big brand" manufacturer will propose dirty cheap shitty "price-entry-point" machines in their "enterprise offer" which could only do UEFI secure-boot (and regular UEFI boot after some arcane manipulation in BIOS).
Secureboot is just like DRM. It isn't really secure, it's just reassuring and it will be popular in the market that need to be reassured.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Your observation I agree with. Your conclusion I dispute. I'm sure you've seen this: http://static.devio.at/simplicity.jpeg The truth of it is borne out by the success of Google and Apple.
Windows 2000 = 5.0
Windows XP = 5.1
Windows Vista = 6.0
Windows 7 = 6.1
Windows 8 = 6.2