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Majority of Enterprise Customers Finally 'Migrating Away From Windows XP'
New submitter TinTops writes "Speaking in a keynote at Intel's Developer Forum, Microsoft's vice president of marketing, Tami Reller, said the firm has 'now seen about three quarters of Windows enterprises moving to modern desktops' from Windows XP, with the last leg of Windows XP migrations being spurred by the imminent availability of Windows 8.1. However, Reller did not offer a breakdown of the enterprise uptake of Windows 8 compared to Windows 7, both of which are counted by Microsoft as modern desktops."
My office is slowly migrating to 7. We have no plans to go with Windows 8 on the desktop.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
...is actually nice desktop OS for functional productivity. It's like having XP but upgraded under the hood for modern hardware. Mine is tastefully retrograded to the XP UI theme, plus some deeper settings to get rid of some of the annoying defaults regarding the task bar.
Had no issues with it for a number of years now and plan to continue using it for the time being.
Windows XP is a great OS. I'm still using it here and boy, my system is very stable and fast.
My office is slowly migrating to 7. We have no plans to go with Windows 8 on the desktop.
For home I took one look at 8 and promptly bought 7.
Our office is not in the habit of supporting 8, so we are actively discouraging adoption of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
people still use Windows XP? It is 2013! Don't tell me they are still running Pentium 3 computers at 900 MHz. My university uses Windows 8 and Dual Core processers at 2.6 GHz. Just saying.
You should try running XP on a recent system sometime; it's very zippy, and with all the patches applied, quite stable.
Plus, it virtualizes well with a low memory footprint.
And?
The attitude you are showing is that of a toy fan, not a professional.
There are still large numbers of XP boxes out there doing tasks every day.
They might not be what you'd want for your own workstation, but for running the mass spectrometer or x ray diffraction machines that would take 200K+ each to replace with the modern ones, they work just fine.
I'll guarantee that a lot of the workhorse computers in the laboratories at your university run XP (or maybe even Win 2K, or NT 4).
I maintain those systems for the chemistry department at a major university. Most researchers aren't flush with so much cash they can replace machines that are only a few years old. And, the manufacturers tend not to update their systems without good reason (if it ain't broke, don't break it by trying to fix it).
Just yesterday, I was working on a system with a VESA local bus 486 DX2 running it. Yeah, it's old, but it does certain specialized x-ray diffraction work just fine. We'll be happy to update it as soon as our broke state (or the NSF that's under sequester) coughs up a quarter to a half a million for something that can replace it. i.e. no time soon.
> We looked at getting Win7 machines - or at least getting Win7 installed onto the machines as part of an agreement - but in the end, it just wasn't worth it. More than half our staff already has Win8 at home and are perfectly comfortable with it, and once you get past the start screen, Win8 is, for our purposes, practically the same as Win7.
Um, no, it really isn't. It must be a relatively small company. We have well over 10,000 users, the great majority of whom are not computer geeks, and there's no way in hell a large company would make a jump like that, unless they were in the business of developing for Windows 8.
What OS incoming hardware has pre-installed makes absolutely no difference. It is always re-imaged with the company's copy of the OS the company has standardized upon, with the company's blessed settings and applications. No company in their right mind buys PCs and runs whatever is already on them. Among other issues, that's a serious security vector.
And so, for years we bought PCs loaded with Vista and reimaged them with our copy of XP. Now we're taking PCs and laptops loaded with whatever (Win8, say) and reloading them with our blessed copy of Win7. That's the way any large company does it who doesn't want to experience a widespread IT nightmare.
So no, unless you're a relatively small company populated with mostly computer geeks, I'm not buying it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Wrong... Windows 3.0 Program Manager supported multiple, overlapping windows. Win8 is a regression to Windows 1.0x, which did not support overlapping windows--only maximized & tiled. We didn't go back to 1990-era capabilities (3.0), but back to 1985-era capabilities. Is there a hack that will allow me to run the tiles in 4-color CGA mode???
Where Win8's crappy Metro tile desktop program loading thingy falls apart is when you have multiple shortcuts that have the same name. How does that happen? Simple: "Uninstall". Not "Uninstall (program"), but "Uninstall". With the Start Menu, "Uninstall" is under the folder of the program (or even in the Win3.x Program Manager Group). No such info on Win8's StartClusterfuck...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I work for a fortune 50, yes 50, company.
You are spot on with XP, Vista, and Win 7. There are quite a few legacy systems stuck on IE6 because of stupid SAP crap. We only recently upgraded those to IE7 !!! (Classic short-sightedness of selling your soul to MS and we are literally paying the devil his due for not having the wisdom to use open standard but I digress.)
I'll be visiting HQ next week. I'll ask some of the admins what our Win8.1 plans (if any) are.
On the back end some flavor of *nix is obviously used. Allways kind of surprised (and glad) to hear OpenBD pop-up when I least expect it. Rest of *nix boxes are usually Solaris with some sort of Blades.
OSX is become more visible. We even have a few satellite offices running OSX exclusively. I've been converting a few developers to *augment* their Win 7 & 8 boxes over to OSX. With the clusterfuck of Win8 it has been an easy "sell". Most people don't realize just how inconsistent and schizophrensic MS's UI is until they try something different. Everyone agrees OSX isn't perfect but compared to the garbage MS is going OSX looks like a saint. Apple couldn't "pay" for better marketing -- all they have to do is let MS suicide itself: Microsoft has never understood good UI. It took them how many years until they had the start of something decent in 95?! LOL
Win8 is an interesting ball of wax. We already in the progress of migration to it -- mostly new Dell laptops. It is universally hated by everyone I talk to. People hate it for two reasons:
a) sake of change for the sake of change when there was nothing "wrong" with the old UI
b) Eveyone agrees Metro makes perfect sense on a tablet but screwing over the desktop users pisses off a lot of people because you are forcing them to waste their time and IT's time to relearn how to do the same thing as before. It is a hindrance from us doing our job and we are already overloaded as it is.
I know that we're definitely going to be staying on Win 7 as long as possible. Hell, we're already running XP in VMs such as VMWare, Parallels and VirtualBox. A few of the OSX users are using Bootcamp - both Win7 and Win8.
I haven't heard of one soul asking to use Win 8 (or 8.1) but when you have 100,000 people it probably takes a little but if time for THAT news to travel. :)