Slashdot Mirror
NPD Group Analysts Say Windows 8 Sales Sluggish
Nerval's Lobster writes "While Microsoft claims it's sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the month since launch—a more rapid pace than Windows 7—new data from research firm The NPD Group suggests that isn't helping sales of actual Windows devices, which, in its estimation, are down 21 percent from last year. Desktops dropped 9 percent year-over-year, while notebooks fell 24 percent. 'After just four weeks on the market, it's still early to place blame on Windows 8 for the ongoing weakness in the PC market,' Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at The NPD Group, wrote in a Nov. 29 statement attached to the data. 'We still have the whole holiday selling season ahead of us, but clearly Windows 8 did not prove to be the impetus for a sales turnaround some had hoped for.'" That seems to match the public grumbling of Acer and Asus about early sales. And though these figures exclude Surface sales, the newly announced prices on for new Windows 8 Pro-equipped Surface tablets might not endear them to anyone. Have you (or has your business?) moved to Windows 8?
Have you (or has your business?) moved to Windows 8?
At our company, which has well over 30,000 PCs deployed, >90% of our systems are still on Windows XP. Who are you kidding? Who is Microsoft kidding? If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it
And before the bleeding edge fanboys... hell, before the slightly-bruised-edge fanboys get up in arms about whatever technical features there are that makes Win 7 a superior OS than XP (and I'm sure there are numerous examples), most organizations of our size suffer from the "Battlestar 78" problem. Our IT environment can only move forward as fast as the slowest mission-critical legacy app. When your biz ops/reg compliance/contractual obligs depend on a niche application that is not yet certified for IE 8, then the revenue-creating side of the company doesn't want to hear squat about group policy optimizations, memory management, or whatever.