Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
Yes, there are some new features in there for corporations but are they going to be enough to outweigh the hinderance of the consumer features?
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That was the gist of the ZDNet article.
MS *is* delivering a homerun of a corporate OS upgrade this year but it is Windows Server, not Win8. Which should be fine for most corporations because the infrastructure features of WinServer will save them money.
Corporate resistance to new Windows releases is neither new nor surprising-- especially the ones that are more consumer-focused like Win95, WinXP, and Win8 that seek to replace "tried-and-true" corporate darlings like Win3.11, Win2K, and Win7--but everytime MS does one of these strategic pivots a lot of people act as if it were the end of the world. Which it isn't.
With Win8, lost in the whine and cheese fest is that Win8 runs all existing applications, in-house and commercial, at least as well as Win7. The new APIs and programming tools are for *new* applications. Nobody is taking their Win32 or .Net away. Superceded or not, those APIs will still be usable 10 years from now.
Realistically, nobody outside clueless-punditland expects any well-run corporate IT department to start moving their desktops to Win8 before next summer. Just running a pilot test is going to take 6 months.
One *big* thing Win8 does offer corporate users, road-warrior dept, is much better TabletPC hardware. And the ARM-based Surface Tablets might become as much a part of the Travelling Exec's toolkit as the digital projector and laser pointer.
Just as before, the whining will be replaced by muted approval and gradual corporate acceptance. And when Windows 12 comes out in 2020 with the next big pivot the whining will begin again...
