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."

Comments

How close to 100% is the Windows 7 percentage?

[rumpledoll]

I suspect well north of 90%. Anyone know a real number for this?

Re:How close to 100% is the Windows 7 percentage?

[tftp]

The 3rd party add-ons do that well enough today. If you haven't "discovered" them yet, you haven't been looking.

Those 3rd party add-ons are not a good option for a business. Microsoft can break the functionality at any time - and they did it once already, with 8.1.

If they do it again, what will you do when on some fine Wednesday 100 workers come to their computers, wiggle the mouse, and they see ... what will they see? They never saw it before. Would be probably a thousand tiles. They will call the IT. The telephones at IT melt down, and the IT director commits seppuku with a dull byte. There is no option to "wait a couple weeks until the Start8 people figure out what is broken *this time*." The option to roll back the updates is also not very easy (if you need it, you aren't set up for approved deployment of patches.)

2-3 years from now, I figure the new start screen will have largely been adopted as mainstream

It won't be because it is not an improvement, it's a regress to Windows 3.0. Full-screen, single window Program Manager.

Re:How close to 100% is the Windows 7 percentage?

[tftp]

True of all 3rd party software. All the time.

Breakage of a random application that dared to use a deprecated API call that suddenly suffered a regression (and wasn't tested, since it's deprecated) does occur. But it's unintentional, and MS may eventually fix the problem. They have no particular reason to protect a problem.

However Metro was a problem that was intentionally created and maintained and protected. Working around that problem is "unwelcome." I don't know how open is the API that the software is using, but as I suspect it is neither very open nor very much designed for 3rd parties. If it's undocumented, here be dragons.

In essence, software like Start8 is actively fighting Microsoft. And Microsoft fights back. What business would want to stand on that battlefield and risk being obliterated by one side or the other?

No, its becoming a tiling window manager, something several linux users run on their own systems by choice and swear by it.

Tiling window managers fit the workflow of precious few users. I don't use it myself (actively hate!) and I don't know anyone who would use one or want one. Many years ago I knew one geek; he was only using console I/O and vi. Perhaps it would work for him. But it's sheer insanity to throw a highly specialized piece of software at unsuspecting people who - for their whole life of computing - have never even seen a tiling WM. The nature of "general computing" suggests that we run different applications, and they have different needs. Tiling WM is OK if you and your software are very logical and very systematic. Most people are nothing of the sort. They just drag their windows around until they get what they want. They do not "program" their WM, they wing it.

And I think most of microsofts defaults for the start screen are stupid on a desktop... but that's all stuff that easily fixable with group policy.

Indeed, plenty of SO/HO users are ready to whip up a few GPOs and deploy them through their AD. That's what those poor souls live for - to fix Windows. Not to repair cars, and not to sell products, and not to bake pizza - but to code GPOs. Sure, this is not a problem at a large company. But it is a huge problem at a smaller company. Now you have to buy a new computer and call the support contractor right away because the computer is not usable "out of the box."

Yeah, that's what XP holdouts were waiting for

[jayhawk88]

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.

Re:Yeah, that's what XP holdouts were waiting for

[Anonymous Coward]

XP being end of life next April was the spur where I work and I expect many other places too. And yeah we're going to 7, not even thinking about 8 except for some tablets.

Re:Yeah, that's what XP holdouts were waiting for

[girlintraining]

The end of Windows 7 extended support is January 14, 2020. Microsoft is not going to make the same mistake of indefinitely extending this date by continuing sales indefinitely.

They tried to kill XP. Repeatedly. They extended the deadline many times. They're going to do it again with Windows 7, because 8 is a steaming three coiled turd. Nobody asks when corporations are upgrading to Vista... because nobody is. How many corporations are looking at Windows 8? Next to none. Go ahead... find a job for a "Windows 7 to Windows 8 migration expert" on a job site for a Fortune 500 company. We'd all love to see the three positions in the entire world that are available for that job. -_-

Please. Microsoft can try shoving stuff down their customer's throats... but all they'll do is get another XBone out of the deal. How's that working out for you, by the way, Ballmer? Polishing up the old resume I hear.

"Modern desktops" LOL

[JoeyRox]

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".

Correlation does not imply causality

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:Windows XP??

[Em Adespoton]

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.

Re:Windows 7...

[ColdWetDog]

Mine is tastefully retrograded to the XP UI theme,

"Tasteful" and "XP UI" have, heretofore, never been seen as linked concepts. Typically, the comments are more along the line of 'my eyes bleed' and 'Turn it off!!!".

I do not want to see what your room looks like.

Re:Windows 7...

[mrscorpio]

He probably means the "classic" theme, which is really the Win2k theme.

Re:We're Skipping Windows 8 and 8.1

[plover]

It's only about XP's end of support on April 8, 2014.

FTFY.

There are zero positive valid business benefits to upgrading to Windows 8+, some non-issues that are used for sales pitches by OS vendors, and several negatives.

In the non-issue column, there are:

• We have no need for any application changes that take "advantage" of any of the new features of the new OS.
• We have no need for any GUI changes that take "advantage" of any of the new features of the new GUI.

In the negative column, we have the following:

• Vendor support. End-of-life is used only for extortion by the vendor. We'd be perfectly content if they continued to support XP. It's not as if those bits rotted away through age.
• GUI changes that disturb people who have no need to learn a new GUI. In particular, I don't want to pay someone extra to waste their time learning a new GUI.
• OS storage requirements that increase the footprint of the OS. I don't want to have to buy new hardware, disks, CPUs, RAM, or motherboards.
• Increasingly complex management and distribution requirements. We solved all those problems already. Now I have to re-solve them for the new OS.
• Their originally poor security model was made more complex without making it better. Again, my training and costs rise, with no ROI.
• Cost. Not only do the new licenses cost, but the ever increasing doom of moving to a Microsoft-based SaaSTCRMFYOAAB (Software as a Service That Collects Rent Money From You On An Annual Basis.) I don't need to pay their cloud fees to do my work.

Microsoft thrives on confusing people into to forgetting that an OS is nothing more than the kernel, and the rest of the crap is GUI and application stuff that should not belong in the hands of the OS vendor. Apple has mastered fostering that misunderstanding as well. It's obviously profitable for them, which means it costs us plenty.

The worst part is that I've had our infrastructure people tell us the cost of deploying Linux is too high, for several of those same negative reasons above. Well, we would have had to do it exactly ONE time, and then we'd have been done. But no, here we are, staring down another Windows end-of-life deadline, getting ready to write them another check. Too bad we can't sue those people for malfeasance.