"That's not how corporations do things" was proven wrong when loads of people started doing a good bit of their daily work on iPads. Even where that is still true it is only true in a particular subset of that organization.
The exception that proves the rule. The ipad influx was driven by execs who largely started it by bringing their own devices to work. The main difference is that the suits wanted ipads and iphones, and IT had to struggle to adopt them. (And it was a pain in the ass.) The ipad is an executive toy that was adopted because people with influence liked them.
Windows is a much larger problem, as most of the company's daily business happens on PCs. Even were we to allow it, there hasn't been a single case of an exec bringing in a Surface Pro and asking for us to make it work on the corporate intranet.
This illustrates the classic meme "People use Apple products because they want to. People use Windows because they have to."
Let me say this again so it's clear: The ipad was grudgingly adopted because people wanted it. Enough people, with enough influence, to get corporate to consider it.
In contrast, nobody in the company wants Windows 8. Nobody is pushing Windows 8. We offer as company phones the iphone (most popular), three Android phones (that collectively come in a close second) a Windows 8 phone, and a Blackberry, which are tied for dead last with only a handful each. We have zero (0) Windows slates.
One can beg the question about being "afraid" and go on and on about "clinging to your old musty OSs" but the fact remains that nobody needs or wants Windows 8. It's an unnecessary upgrade for corporate and a support nightmare. It buys us nothing but countless hours on support lines and decreased productivity while rank-and-file workers try to figure out what the hell is a "charms bar". A large company in a competitive environment would be giving their competitors an edge as they went through the churn, and nobody in their right mind would do that in a down economy.
It's a dead issue. We'll see what Microsoft has when Win7 reaches EOL. In the meantime, there is a struggle to get away from thick client apps so we don't have to revisit this issue every time Microsoft craps out something they think we should be using.
>... One of our customers has over 50k desktops, a business in the hospitality industry... going straight to Windows 8 next year, in both corp offices and individual locations around the globe.
> It is never easy changing OS versions. But if you are reluctant to the point of fear, nothing would ever change.
It's not a matter of fear. I have one machine running Windows 8 for testing purposes. After a reasonable amount of testing, I don't intend to ever have another machine running Windows 8. This is not fear. This is practicality.
There's no reason to switch. Win7 will be around for a long time, and the longer I use it the longer Microsoft has to fix the next version of their OS.
At work, the company buys PCs and reimages them with whatever the company has standardized on. So the fact that the machines come in with Win8 is moot.
And seriously, the OS is just a program loader and a resource manager. It is *not* the application. I don't need it to change. I most especially don't need the GUI to change from square opaque to rounded translucent and back to square opaque for no damned reason whatsoever.
We're up on the shallow end of the curve on OS development. There is no overriding reason to buy the next version.
> 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.
Yeah. The company I worked for started migrating to Windows 7 earlier this year. We're maybe 30% there. We're going to skip 8.whatever and see what's available when 7 nears end of life.
Corporations that are not themselves in the computer business tend to be a bit conservative about OS upgrades.
Let's see. My wife goes into labor at 4:00 AM*, and sleepy and excited I get into the car to drive her to the hospital... only to have the car refuse to start, as my brain waves don't match its stored template. Oh, yeah, that will go over well.
* That was, in fact, when my wife went into labor.
My wife can't wear wristwatches. Mechanical or electronic, they stop working after a very short time. The watch repair guy finally gave up, suggested she just ask me what time it was.
15 years ago I was rolling with 1600x1200 on a monitor capable of even higher resolution than that. Now you have to pay premium coin just to get a modest improvement on that vertical resolution.
Agreed. If it's not 1200 high (minimum), I'm not interested. Admittedly, this makes it difficult (but not impossible) to find monitors.
But you don't have to actually use Metro to get things done. The normal desktop is still there, and if you start typing in Metro, then what you are looking for quickly pops up in a search result.
If I wanted to type to run programs, I wouldn't be using a fscking GUI.
Mod up. This is a key point that Microsoft doesn't seem to get. If we're going to be typing the names of programs, why not just boot into a CLI? Why even bother with that garish refrigerator-door interface?
> But you don't have to actually use Metro to get things done. The normal desktop is still there, and if you start typing in Metro, then what you are looking for quickly pops up in a search result
Metro/Modern is actually a decent UI for tablets. The desktop is where it sucks. Maybe Win 9 will have a dual UI mode as 8.1 doesn't seem to fix this gap.
As much as I dislike Apple (my work issued me an ipad; after a week I gave it back), they understand touch interface in a way that Microsoft probably never will. Yes, with diligence you can figure out how to make Win8 do most things, but it's not an OS you can just pick up and use, as you can any Apple device. Conveyance, I think someone said. They eye is not led to what the fingers should be doing. It's a major defect, and it may not be fixable.
It's not an ipad killer because Microsoft hasn't built up the mindshare that Apple has, and because Windows 8 is pants. Microsoft tried to sell the Surface at boutique prices, and that didn't work out as well as they'd hoped. This device is at least priced right, but that only fixes one problem to uncover several more. Not the least of which is, most people don't want Windows 8. Yes, it'll run Microsoft legacy apps, in a weird, Win8 kind of way. That's not as important as it used to be.
I think Microsoft had two motivations to release the RT: (1) to show that they are a player in the ARM space. (2) to muddy the waters in the non-Intel tablet field. There might have been a third motivation, to strong-arm Intel into releasing a more tablet-friendly architecture, but I suspect that was a bonus rather than an objective.
In any case, I agree with you -- the RT is dead. It was never meant to be a serious product.
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"That's not how corporations do things" was proven wrong when loads of people started doing a good bit of their daily work on iPads. Even where that is still true it is only true in a particular subset of that organization.
The exception that proves the rule. The ipad influx was driven by execs who largely started it by bringing their own devices to work. The main difference is that the suits wanted ipads and iphones, and IT had to struggle to adopt them. (And it was a pain in the ass.) The ipad is an executive toy that was adopted because people with influence liked them.
Windows is a much larger problem, as most of the company's daily business happens on PCs. Even were we to allow it, there hasn't been a single case of an exec bringing in a Surface Pro and asking for us to make it work on the corporate intranet.
This illustrates the classic meme "People use Apple products because they want to. People use Windows because they have to."
Let me say this again so it's clear: The ipad was grudgingly adopted because people wanted it. Enough people, with enough influence, to get corporate to consider it.
In contrast, nobody in the company wants Windows 8. Nobody is pushing Windows 8. We offer as company phones the iphone (most popular), three Android phones (that collectively come in a close second) a Windows 8 phone, and a Blackberry, which are tied for dead last with only a handful each. We have zero (0) Windows slates.
One can beg the question about being "afraid" and go on and on about "clinging to your old musty OSs" but the fact remains that nobody needs or wants Windows 8. It's an unnecessary upgrade for corporate and a support nightmare. It buys us nothing but countless hours on support lines and decreased productivity while rank-and-file workers try to figure out what the hell is a "charms bar". A large company in a competitive environment would be giving their competitors an edge as they went through the churn, and nobody in their right mind would do that in a down economy.
It's a dead issue. We'll see what Microsoft has when Win7 reaches EOL. In the meantime, there is a struggle to get away from thick client apps so we don't have to revisit this issue every time Microsoft craps out something they think we should be using.
> ... One of our customers has over 50k desktops, a business in the hospitality industry ... going straight to Windows 8 next year, in both corp offices and individual locations around the globe.
That's corporate suicide, and you know it.
Kidding, right?
> It is never easy changing OS versions. But if you are reluctant to the point of fear, nothing would ever change.
It's not a matter of fear. I have one machine running Windows 8 for testing purposes. After a reasonable amount of testing, I don't intend to ever have another machine running Windows 8. This is not fear. This is practicality.
There's no reason to switch. Win7 will be around for a long time, and the longer I use it the longer Microsoft has to fix the next version of their OS.
At work, the company buys PCs and reimages them with whatever the company has standardized on. So the fact that the machines come in with Win8 is moot.
And seriously, the OS is just a program loader and a resource manager. It is *not* the application. I don't need it to change. I most especially don't need the GUI to change from square opaque to rounded translucent and back to square opaque for no damned reason whatsoever.
We're up on the shallow end of the curve on OS development. There is no overriding reason to buy the next version.
You know how I know you're lying?...
More than half our staff already has Win8 at home
Yeah, what are the chances that the entire Win8 user base works for one company?
Um, on second thought, that's likely to be true...
Seriously, that's not how corporations do things. Which is why Cobol written in the seventies is still in use.
> 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.
Yeah. The company I worked for started migrating to Windows 7 earlier this year. We're maybe 30% there. We're going to skip 8.whatever and see what's available when 7 nears end of life.
Corporations that are not themselves in the computer business tend to be a bit conservative about OS upgrades.
Let's see. My wife goes into labor at 4:00 AM*, and sleepy and excited I get into the car to drive her to the hospital... only to have the car refuse to start, as my brain waves don't match its stored template. Oh, yeah, that will go over well.
* That was, in fact, when my wife went into labor.
Yep, same here. I think they do it on purpose.
> Now just wrap yourself up in nerf foam, and lay back and watch reality TV.
My wife can't wear wristwatches. Mechanical or electronic, they stop working after a very short time. The watch repair guy finally gave up, suggested she just ask me what time it was.
Can you hear me NOW?
Could it be... that Win8 is the problem?
> Windows 8 is "pants"... on the desktop. But on a tablet, that's where the interface doesn't suck.
Compared to Windows 8 on the desktop.
I blame the mentality that profiling is some horrible crime, therefore everyone must be overly searched.
I see over-searching as a punishment for resisting profiling. That might be the same thing as you said.
Them females showing their ankles, that's begging for rape.
In this case, it would be blamed on inadvertently showing their ankles while the rape was occurring.
15 years ago I was rolling with 1600x1200 on a monitor capable of even higher resolution than that. Now you have to pay premium coin just to get a modest improvement on that vertical resolution.
Agreed. If it's not 1200 high (minimum), I'm not interested. Admittedly, this makes it difficult (but not impossible) to find monitors.
But you don't have to actually use Metro to get things done. The normal desktop is still there, and if you start typing in Metro, then what you are looking for quickly pops up in a search result.
If I wanted to type to run programs, I wouldn't be using a fscking GUI.
Mod up. This is a key point that Microsoft doesn't seem to get. If we're going to be typing the names of programs, why not just boot into a CLI? Why even bother with that garish refrigerator-door interface?
> But you don't have to actually use Metro to get things done. The normal desktop is still there, and if you start typing in Metro, then what you are looking for quickly pops up in a search result
Ok, agreed. Given that, why do you need touch?
Metro/Modern is actually a decent UI for tablets. The desktop is where it sucks. Maybe Win 9 will have a dual UI mode as 8.1 doesn't seem to fix this gap.
As much as I dislike Apple (my work issued me an ipad; after a week I gave it back), they understand touch interface in a way that Microsoft probably never will. Yes, with diligence you can figure out how to make Win8 do most things, but it's not an OS you can just pick up and use, as you can any Apple device. Conveyance, I think someone said. They eye is not led to what the fingers should be doing. It's a major defect, and it may not be fixable.
I don't get it, how is this not an iPad killer?
It's not an ipad killer because Microsoft hasn't built up the mindshare that Apple has, and because Windows 8 is pants. Microsoft tried to sell the Surface at boutique prices, and that didn't work out as well as they'd hoped. This device is at least priced right, but that only fixes one problem to uncover several more. Not the least of which is, most people don't want Windows 8. Yes, it'll run Microsoft legacy apps, in a weird, Win8 kind of way. That's not as important as it used to be.
Ok, I don't get the "meh" posts. Touchscreen. Keyboard. $400 for 64 gb version. Real Windows (i.e.: Windows 8.1, not RT).
This is a pretty nice computer at a very nice price.
Windows 8. Meh.
I think Microsoft had two motivations to release the RT: (1) to show that they are a player in the ARM space. (2) to muddy the waters in the non-Intel tablet field. There might have been a third motivation, to strong-arm Intel into releasing a more tablet-friendly architecture, but I suspect that was a bonus rather than an objective.
In any case, I agree with you -- the RT is dead. It was never meant to be a serious product.
Seems rather pricey for a 10" netbook.
True. But significantly cheaper than the Surface Pro. At least, the prices are going in the right direction.
Still, Win8 would have to improve considerably before I'd ever consider one.