Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe they are migrating to Canada. I hear that it is a nice country.
I suspect well north of 90%. Anyone know a real number for this?
I don't know why any sane company would be "spurred by the imminent availability of Windows 8.1" to drop XP. It's much more about XP's end of support on April 8, 2014. We can't have soon-to-be-unpatched boxes and laptops on our network, although I'm sure some will be in hiding past that date (VMs, second systems, etc).
Windows 8.1. *eyeroll* They're going to 7 you morons, and they're going to stay there for another 15 years. Doesn't matter what you do to the Start Menu.
It's a really bad sign when you have to obfuscate product uptake percentages with amorphous terms like "modern desktops" to cover up the fact that your latest flagship software release was an unmitigated disaster. Maybe instead of blaming Microsoft's horrible missteps on Balmer we can blame them on the "Modern Microsoft execute".
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.
Um, no. Even though firms are buying Win 8, it doesn't mean that they are installing Win 8. Many of them are using a Win 8 license to install Win 7. If MS believes enterprises and consumers want Win 8 by choice, they are deluded.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
...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.
We're finally getting around to having a bunch of XP boxes replaced with new ones, simply because they're old and a hardware failure in one of them triggered the decision to do pretty much all.
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.
I do say 'once you get past the start screen', but we're actually seeing uptake in using it. We tried a few 3rd party start menu offerings (most of them are crap, from not letting you modify it through not even listing all of the installed software that you would see listed if it were a proper start menu), eventually settling on one.. only to realize that most of the staff felt perfectly comfortable with either A. going to the pinned items on the task bar, or B. typing the name of the program from the start screen (we haven't bothered with tiles for most things, and removed almost all of the defaults... if they want to know the weather, they can listen to the forecast every half an hour on the radio, or hunt down the app in 'all apps').
While the future direction of Win8 may be something to worry about (more and more store-centric, marginalizing the desktop, etc.), the future of Win7 isn't all roses either. Given that Win8 at least will enjoy support far past Win7, well, the choice was a lot easier than we anticipated.
Our biggest struggle has actually been with outdated software. 16bit software just won't run on Win8 (64bit - can be enabled on 32bit, but that's just another wall waiting to be hit), and while our admin would be comfortable with installing a VM to keep these going, we're just biting the bullet and converting legacy files to formats used by more modern software, finding alternatives for those applications that we do still actively use, and keeping two machines around for everything else; one running with a VNC, and the other in storage 'just in case'.
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.
I would not be surprised if for Microsoft, "Modern Desktop" means "with NSA compliant backdoors". I have been obliged to switch from XP to 7 and frankly I gained nothing in terms of functionalities or ease of access.
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.
To Linux. We have been 100% Linux since then - not a single Microsoft machine in the entire operation. And yes, we do get threatening letters from the BSA every year...
I meant updating the entire x ray diffraction machine to a new one, not just the computer.
I always find this alarming about lab equipment. You have something costing $500,000 but is entirely dependent on a $2000 computer. Not only that the "cheap" computer is both likely to break before anything else and be very difficult to replace.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
you must really hate him.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.