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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."
stop trying to force this metro UI garbage down every bodies throat. UI design is NOT a once size fits all endeavor!
On a personal level, I agree. On a corporate level, I'm afraid I largely disagree. Corporations are full of people that will suck up IT's time with their very own customized desktop. The weight of the few that could actually make themselves more productive and not take up undue resources is outweighed by the many who'd just wasting company time being equally or less effective. That goes for development too, I remember one story about a lady who wanted to make all sorts of little adjustments to layouts, captions, alignments and so on, the developer billing by the hour. It quickly ended when her boss found out and told her to stop wasting time and money on insignificant details like that, but she didn't feel that cost. She just wanted it her way and didn't care how much company resources she was wasting.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
The biggest reason Windows 8 won't be another Vista is because Microsoft is now legacying Win32. The mandatory start screen just drives that home. If you could turn back on the start menu, it wouldn't be bad, but MS really wants everyone to know the "desktop" is dead.
Developers may well conclude that if they're rewriting for a new API, they might as well pick iOS or Android as that's what people already have & enjoy using.
Windows 8 = beginning of the end of the Wintel ecosystem
At the office the MS rep was asking the CEO and CTO when we were going to move to Windows 8, The rep was told, AS soon as we get an unlimited Site license for Server Enterprise, SQL enterprise, Exchange Enterprise, Office, and Windows 8 super ultimate premium professional edition for free from you.
Until then we are still on target for switching away from Microsoft as a platform on servers and desktops.
The MS rep was visibly shaken, We have successfully deployed libre office everywhere to kick out office. WE are also starting to switch sales people over to Chrome books and google docs.
MSFT in the back office and desktop is so 2012, the future is microsoft free.
But... they do. You can replace the shell (by default explorer.exe) with whatever shell you want via a simple registry change - there are several third-party shells out there. Of course they aren't as popular as Explorer, but then again I feel the default Windows shell is extremely flexible and has far fewer issues with it compared to most Linux DEs such that most people don't feel the the need to have to change shells in the first place. Every single DE I've tried in Linux has some issue that isn't present in another DE, even though that alternative DE has issues not present in the first. Windows 7 seems to have made enough sensible decisions and allow enough flexibility as part of its shipped shell so that this isn't an issue.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.