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Windows 8 Killing PC Sales
yl-roller writes "IDC says Windows 8 is partly to blame for PC sales suffering the largest percentage drop ever. 'As if that news wasn't' troubling enough, it appears that a pivotal makeover of Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system seems to have done more harm than good since the software was released last October.' According to a ZDNet article, IDC originally expected a drop, but only half the size."
An "important note" at the bottom of the ZDNet article explains that much of this drop is caused by the rise of convertible tablet PCs that run a PC operating system, which IDC counts as tablets, not PCs. Gartner appears to count them as PCs if they run a PC operating system, not a smartphone-derived, all-maximized-all-the-time operating system like iOS or Android.
corporate IT is so tied to Microsoft
I work for a multinational company, very structured, AMAZING levels of bureaucracy and I thought we were joined at the hip, neck and everywhere else to Microsoft products - yet I was amazed to hear they are moving this company (200k+ employees) over to Gmail for emails and contacts as well as a bunch of other things. Until I heard that, I would have bet body parts to say that they would never move off their current technology.
Having said that, we are still on XP rather than having skipped Vista to Win 7.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
XP was the true NT/98 hybrid. Win2K was still firmly in the NT camp, with no Home version and much more expensive pricing.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
This pretty much means you aren't in any industry that has government contracts
Not true. I work for a government research lab and we switched to GMail last year. Check it out: https://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/government/
XP64 was poorly supported by driver developers. For Vista and 7 MS mandated that both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers must be available at the same time, or MS will not sign any of them. This helped. Another factor is that in XP days 2 GB or RAM was all that most people had, and 64-bit bought you nothing. Today there is probably no new PC out there that has less than 4 GB of RAM, and 64-bit OS is a necessity. RAM-hungry applications also come now as 64-bit builds; a build for XP64 was unheard of.
I used to tell folks that adding RAM would be their best speed upgrade, but now I tell them that an SSD is the best speed upgrade.
The problem with giving this advice to unsophisticated users is that they will use the SSD in ways that tend to shorten its service life. It can be quite a shock to these users when they go to boot their machine one day and find it dead. Their experience with traditional hard drives, which rarely fail so badly and suddenly that there isn't at least a chance to move data off, may earn them a nasty surprise when their data is lost. If you recommend an SSD upgrade you should probably also recommend a traditional external hard drive as a backup device, with regular automated backups, and at least warn them that SSDs have a limited number of writes and can become unreadable with little or no warning.
http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops
Linux laptops, no Microsoft Tax.