Slashdot Mirror
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
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?!?
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.
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
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'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.
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.
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.
Still working at her age? Guess she should've saved for retirement, huh?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
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
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
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
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 ]
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 ]
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.