Slashdot Mirror
Windows 8 Release Date: October 26th
Several readers sent word that Microsoft has selected a release date for Windows 8: October 26th. Steven Sinofsky made the announcement today at the company's annual sales meeting. The new version of the operating system will be sent to manufacturers next month, giving them plenty of time to prepare for general availability.
Shit, people are angry that Office 2013 is not compatible with Exchange 2003.
The catch? It has not been supported or patched in years! Corporations will just use XP until 2019 and get infected over and over again. XP wont die and it will make tech support people rich in years to come after 2014
http://saveie6.com/
True enough, but it doesn't matter if the computer is stable and functioning within normal parameters if you can't actually do anything useful. Of course, it's not *that* bad, but forcing metro on desktops and laptops is absurd.
I have no intention of upgrading my desktops to Windows 8. From everything I've used and read on and about Windows 8, the start menu is a desktop PC disaster...but for touch, holy cow is it beautiful. I will keep my desktops/laptop running Windows 7 and grab a Windows 8 RT Surface. I think Microsoft wants this to be the reaction of most users. The start menu is just to grab developers attention of "hey this is going to be on every PC shipped out until Windows 9 hits, you have huge app exposure now." Those apps run on Windows Phone & Windows RT and the New Xbox...Microsoft then almost overnight has a platform that will be expansive and cross platform putting a fight up against Apple's appstore. Then in Windows 9 they can dial back the Metro start menu, make it more intuitive for the desktop and they suffer no loss. They might even GAIN share thanks to the tablet market. Windows 8 sells as bad as Vista did, big deal, Vista sold millions upon millions of licenses & the PC market is flat...and Windows 7 is the best desktop environment (in my opinion.) This is all about Microsoft flanking Apple in the tablet & phone markets. Nothing more, nothing less. I'll buy a Windows Phone 8, a Surface RT, and keep my desktops on 7. Yet Microsoft still wins.
I hate to say it, but I think this is going to be a very profitable and successful time for Apple. People are going to look at Metro and barf, and start looking for alternatives. Then they'll think, "maybe I'll try out that Linux thing everyone's been talking about", and of course look for the most popular distro which is, of course, Ubuntu. They'll go to the trouble of trying that out somehow, see how awful Unity is, and realize that it's no great alternative to Metro. Then they'll say "screw it, I'll just buy a Mac" and go to the local Apple store and buy an overpriced computer there.
They might also try out Fedora with Gnome3 instead, but the result will be exactly the same.
This could have been a great opportunity for Linux on the desktop, but between Mark Shuttleworth and the Gnome devs, the cause for Linux on the desktop is pretty much lost.
Windows has an 84% *desktop* marketshare. Meanwhile servers, tablets, phones and embedded devices of all kinds run all sorts of operating systems (if they have one), that are mostly not Windows. It turns out that most of computing is actually not on the desktop (eg. servers running the Internet, telephony and corporate environments like banks etc). Of course, because it is invisible and mostly *just works*(TM) people don't know about it - they only know about Windows on their lil' desktop and how it is in their consciousness a lot since it requires so much effort to keep working properly.
If only Ubuntu hadn't made so many mistakes in the past 4 versions, then probably many would have moved to it