Like XP or Vista: how will businesses treat Windows 8?

[DainBramaged]

Businesses hated Windows Vista. It required new drivers, and new security features like User Account Control caused problems with older applications. Computers that shipped before Vista often lacked the RAM and graphics hardware to take full advantage of the new operating system's capabilities. It made extensive changes to how the operating system was customized and deployed. Businesses hated Windows Vista so much that they overwhelmingly chose to stay on Windows XP. Even after these problems were largely resolved, it took a new operating system to get companies to start upgrading.

Windows 7 is a big step up from XP, both in terms of security and features. For businesses who are in the middle of or have already completed Windows 7 migrations, can Windows 8 offer them enough incentive to consider upgrading again, or do its interface changes doom it to share Vista's fate?

Back in the days of the Consumer Preview, Microsoft put out a PDF detailing the most pertinent Windows 8 features for small and large businesses (that PDF is still a good resource for the Release Preview and will remain so for the release version of Windows 8, so read up if you’re interested). Some of these have relatively broad appeal for businesses, while others will be more useful for particular niches.

Of broad interest is the new Reset and Refresh function, which can be used to return a user’s PC to a pristine state without necessarily wiping their data. Using the new recimg command line tool, administrators can capture an image of a system before deployment and store it on the computer’s hard drive or a networked share. This should be useful in both large and small businesses in the event that a user’s computer is damaged by malware, user error, or some other catastrophe.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/the-vista-curse-businesses-may-not-want-windows-8/


This piece of shit is Windows Millenium with a pretty face, in two years it's history. What a piece of unbelievable shit.

[Xyzse]

1. To tell the truth...

I am not quite certain how it will go.
Even though I am not a fan of the "Apple-ization" of Microsoft in regards to how Windows has been turning in to looking like candy, one has to give them credit for the idea of the way Windows 8 has been designed to be for dual capacity. Meaning, it fully integrates to the ARMs and x86s, giving a desktop to the x86 machines.

Along with their cloud service which they are calling Azure, they seem to have a decent enough strategy moving forwards. However, I am not going to forecast success, all I know is, they are big enough to remain a player for years to come.

Besides, there are many like myself who will not go to a Mac for many reasons, I have a huge disincentive to move du to their file/directory system method.

Either way, sooner or later people will move to a new system. There is a Push for 8, and if they can actually make it work, as it is an OS that cross platforms(yes I used platforms as a verb) as is evidenced from their Windows Phone, XBox 360 shell and so forth.

[JCMach1]

2. 8 is going to push all kinds of convergence between all the MS products...

I think most businesses will skip this generation as most are just now migrating to 7.

[Xyzse]

5. That's why I am not sure

I mean, they have to have as good a strategy as they can go for.
It is not as if they are like Mac who has a captive audience who are up for the next new thing.

Windows is a victim of their own functionality.

[JCMach1]

6. Yep that's the issue...

But it won't be long now before you will be doing EXCEL sheets on your XBox...

[Xyzse]

12. Yeah, that would be nice.

I love my excel sheets. The more I can use it in different platforms the better.
You're talking to a guy who creates his own auto-updating daily-weekly, to monthly-yearly calendars that involve expenses, work out regiments and nutrition. It tells me how much calories I can still have as I go, how much I can still spend, per day, per week, per month, and I can have a report on how much better I am doing in my repetitions and weight training. It is awesome sauce!

If I can actually update that through my smart phone, It'd be great!
Problem is, it would be ungainly. I have my keyboard short cuts down, and I'd miss it elsewhere.

Seriously though, I'm glad for the functionality of Windows. All they can really do is improve upon the shell and try to have better performance. The problem is, that with so much bloatware, it slows down that thing to a crawl, as well as their own "special touches".

A suggestion for Microsoft would be a better user management tool on resources.
Meaning, the Task Manager would have better control on allocating resources to whichever process or program.
Processes would show which Programs are using them. As well as tells you if it is a necessary Operating System process.
It would also allow one to improve performance on the programs you want to deal with.
If there are multiple instances of a process (i.e. Internet Explorer), have a better way of telling which one corresponds to which tab.

Lastly, by having something like this, it would allow Microsoft to correspond with developers on documentation on what they are using and their process names. It would allow users to figure out which one could possibly be adware, bloatware or what have you. I mean, technically they have this somewhat with their Task Manager, but if they can make it more user friendly, I think that would be a great thing. Rather than having to create one's own or download something that does those particular tasks.

This may possibly improve performance issues that plague PCs. Other issues of course is that it is very diverse and some components don't work as well, but that is the business model of the PC where people are encouraged to build their own. Although the trend nowadays is away from that, and going for premade machines with crappy OEMs.

That's not something that Microsoft themselves could change, but browsers(such as IE, Chrome and so forth) are technically their own OS nowadays, so the idea of an operating system like Windows is slowly dying. It won't die any time soon, but that seems to be the trend.

I wish them luck.

[Nye Bevan]

3. It has to be shit. That's the plan.

If it wasn't shit, 2 years from now how would they sell people on upgrading to Windows 9?

[IDemo]

4. They clung to XP like a barnacle to a rock

I don't see anyone upgrading to Win8 without an overwhelming reason to.

[pstokely]

7. Many haven't upgraded to 7

nt

[HopeHoops]

8. (Yawn)

Vista's a piece of shit. XP still works. Win98SE still works. Win7 (curiously) works. Win8 is little more than a service pack and I won't trust it as long as my Win7 boxes are still working. M$ doesn't have a great track record on stability. The whole purpose of coming out with new versions seems to be to force upgrades on the threat that they will discontinue support for prior versions. Try hunting around for Vista's SP1 - not easy, but it's there. I predicted 30 years ago that Apple would eventually squash M$'s dominance, but curiously it is the non-PC aspect of the business that did it (tablets, phones, MP3, etc.) And does anyone else think it is odd that Open Office can read older M$ Office files while the new M$ Office products can't do it correctly?

[LibertyLover]

9. We use Vista at the office

and it's a piece of garbage. I use 7 at home and like it almost as much as XP. Gods know, it's faster than Vista and not as clunky.

[Ron Obvious]

10. Part of Vista's prioblems

At least a significant part of the problems people had with Vista was the ungodly amount of crapware and adware the laptop manufacturers loaded onto the machines they sold. Unlike Apple, MS simply can't control the totality of the user experience and the average consumer isn't savy enough to fix these issues. I always reformat the hard drive after purchase and put on a clean copy of the OS and spend a day configuring it how I like. Had little problem with Vista SP1 and Windows 7 is excellent.

That said, I'll be giving Win 8 a miss. It looks absolutely awful and I just don't want a tablet OS on my desktop or laptops in any case. Ubuntu has gone a similar path with the dreadful Unity interface, and while I do like Linux Mint pretty well, I'll be sticking win Win7 for the foreseeable future.

[guardian]

11. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

My Win 7 machine runs fine. I'll look at Win 8 in about 2 years.

[Bake]

13. Honestly, I don't give two fat shits what "business" thinks

about much of anything, much less another piece of shit from Microsoft.

Bake

[hobbit709]

14. Windows 8 is Vista with a cellphone interface.

[Zalatix]

15. Microsoft should have waited.

They would have done a LOT better by reintroducing pan-and-scan virtual desktop support, where your desktop extends past the boundaries of your monitor and you simply move your cursor to the edge of the screen and the screen moves to reveal additional screen space. This popular feature was available in Windows XP and is available in Linux. It would work great with touch screen monitors, basically making Windows work like an Android screen. Mouse gesture and touch screen gesture support could also be added in.

Past that, there's nothing else that needs to be done with Windows for the next 5 years, except security upgrades.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

16. Win 7 runs good enough for me at home and work

I hate how expensive it is to upgrade to new Windows and would, if I could use all of my programs with Linux, probably switch over to that instead so I never have to worry about paying another dime for yet ANOTHER Windows OS upgrade. Unfortunately, there are still a few programs I use religiously (i.e. iTunes) that haven't been made available for Linux yet (AFAIK).

[slackmaster]

17. My employer has no intention of touching it, or any other version of Windows when we can avoid it

We have a few situations in which a customer or vendor is using application software that runs only on Windows and have had to implement a few virtual Windows machines. We deployed a kiosk demo system on Windows on a Dell that has a nice touch-screen display.

Other than that, it's all open source with Macintosh workstations.