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Microsoft Likely To See a Boost in Windows 10 Sales This New Year (fortune.com)
Because many businesses are wary of new software updates, let alone a new operating system, Microsoft could see a significant surge in Windows 10 install base and sales in the New Year. From a report on Fortune: Businesses have been slow to upgrade all of their corporate computers to the latest Windows OS in 2016, according to research by IT services and technology company Adaptiva. Adaptiva said Tuesday that based on its findings, it believes companies are going to be upgrading to the latest version in 2017. Adaptiva based its findings from a survey it conducted over the summer of 300 IT professionals at various businesses. The company said that 41% of the companies it surveyed have been avoiding the upgrade, and some "have gone so far as to actively resist the move by using software to prevent or disable Windows 10 installation." The survey didn't say why exactly companies were avoiding the upgrade, but the majority of respondents that did upgrade "rated the Windows 10 migration process to be somewhat to extremely challenging," the survey said. According to latest figures provided by Microsoft, Windows 10 is running on over 400 million devices.
Win 10 is good OS that would be quickly adopted if/when MS decided to remove or make optional bolted-on telemetry malware. Such "feature" is simply not acceptable on a non-free product.
Unless you can get Windows 10 Enterprise, your business is Microsoft's business.. Even if you "castrate" Home and Pro, they still blab your business to Microsoft. And even if you *could* completely disable the spyware aspects of 10, how do you know that MS won't come along and turn it all back on via one of its updates? If you trust MS at all, you have your head in the sand.. The only way to win with Windows 10 is to NOT PLAY.... Let the MS apologists mod me down... It HAD to be said..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Our company is one that initially resisted a Windows 10 migration. One of the big reasons is that we still rely on some older software that's incompatible with Windows 10 unless you keep a very expensive maintenance agreement current with the vendor, so you can get/use their latest update. In our case, we're trying to migrate off of that product completely in the next year or so, switching to one that's being customized for our needs at this time under a different maintenance agreement.
But realistically? That's only a product used by a small sub-set of our employees who deal directly with Finance / Accounting issues.
We found ourselves deploying Windows 10 to anyone else who needed a new PC, simply because we standardized on the Surface Pro 4 as the default hardware moving forward. (We have a lot of highly mobile workers involved in sales/marketing or creative design - and for those who aren't on Macs, they keep demanding a portable that's as light and thin as possible - with the drawing pen a big plus for a few situations. So the Surface Pro 4 just made the most sense to appease the majority of them while keeping things within our budget as long as we buy the model with the Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and the 256GB SSD in it.)
We did some "piecemeal" upgrades of other HP "Elitebook" laptops and Dell Latitudes out there as well. And the results? The move from Win 7 to 10 caused us a little initial pain, building a customized image that we felt was suitable for our users. (We wanted to make sure the "Metro" tiles on their START button only displayed the applications relevant to us, for example. No need for things like XBox or Candy Crush to show up prominently there! And we had a couple of situations where we had to make sure printer drivers on our Windows servers were upgraded, so the shared printers would still work properly for the Win 10 folks.) In a couple of cases, the Dell computers needed a BIOS upgrade before they'd complete the Win 10 upgrade properly, too. But overall? Things generally work fine. Most user issues/questions after the migration are centered around new features in Windows 10 they didn't understand how to use. One "gotcha" has been the "tablet mode" feature in 10. Some of the HP laptops have motion sensors in them that were probably intended only to detect a fall or shock, to power down spinning hard drives. But Win 10 uses it anyway to determine if the PC is "rotated", and tries to switch everything on screen into the tablet-friendly touch-screen mode. Needless to say, that's not good on a non touch-compatible laptop, AND it doesn't even sense the rotation motion reliably. It just winds up switch modes somewhat randomly when the PC is moved around.
What's the matter with Slashdot? Why has it become a Microsoft's propaganda vehicle?
With past versions of Windows a business could wait until it was stable and then upgrade, but with Windows 10 it is in constant development and is never stable. Once to twice per year Microsoft is doing an Windows 10 "update", which is actually a whole new operating system download and completely new installation. It's supposed to transfer everything across, but it actually fails miserably and destroys your computer. To make matters worse the updates can remove features or settings that you use.
The constant state of flux that Windows 10 is in would create chaos in your companies IT infrastructure. Windows 10 is all about what Microsoft want with no thought at all given to the customer/user.
The unsigned article in Fortune reads like a Microsoft PR plant.
At least they took the MS PR Logo off before they republished it.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!