Windows 8 FREE - MS just screwed up hurry

That's just not true. Enterprise is a big portion of their revenue, but it's not the majority. This company has Office, Xbox, and Windows Phone as well. They survived Vista and ME, which not a company on earth upgraded to, and they'll survive this. The fact is, enterprises are slow to upgrade, and don't like doing so every 3 years. Windows 7 just recently passed XP in enterprise, after 3 years. I think MS has accepted this and doesn't anticipate many more enterprise upgrades until Windows 9.

Meanwhile, they're trying to tie the various (competing) divisions of Microsoft into a single user experience. With Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Windows 8 RT, Xbox, and the new Hotmail, they're trying to create an ecosystem that they've previously lacked. If that's successful, they just won't need to pay as much attention to enterprise, because what's the alternative? Businesses won't switch to Macs or Linux. So if they only release an enterprise-friendly OS every 5 years or so, they're not going to lose much money.


But you're only looking at it from one perspective. MS has appeared misguided in the past, and often seems like it has an identity crisis. But I think they know Windows 8 is not enterprise-friendly. And I think some very smart people there calculated the risk to enterprise revenue against the expansion of consumer revenue.

The reason I think this will be the OS that kills Microsoft is that, in the business world, where Microsoft has to realize, most if it's income is derived from. Is not buying Windows 8.

The consumer tablet/laptop/desktop market doesn't hold water to huge companies buying 15,000 new desktops for their employees. No one is leaving Windows 7 from a business workstation perspective and that is not going to result in positive revenue for Microsoft.

Exactly, I work for a fortune 500 enterprise software company and though most people are on win 7 now, we still have a lot on XP. Only recently has tech support started forcing people to upgrade to win 7 since they don't support XP anymore. By the time the next upgrade rolls around it'll be win 9 or later. The other guy who thinks MS is doomed is just tripping... yeah maybe win8 won't do so good, but it won't bring them down.

The same goes with our software as well, we're developing 2 versions ahead of what our enterprise customers use...

Most large companies don't "rush" out to update their OS when a new one is released. I work for a multi-billion dollar global corporation and about 80% of the laptop and desktops we have still run XP.

In fact, until just after the first quarter of the year new laptops that were shipped with Win 7 were wiped and had XP loaded. Why? A lot of our internal programs weren't coded for Win 7 and were not stable.

Our programmers have finished re-coding and making sure everything is stable for the move to Win 7. Now as people break or need replacements, they are getting Win 7.

My company upgrading to Win 8 has nothing to do with Win 8 but rather our slow corporate response to updating technology.

We just got half of our department off Office 2002 and onto Office 2007. It's easier for large (well over 10,000 laptop/desktops in the wild throughout the company) to use what you have until the last second. A big chuck of our sales department are still running 2002 version of excel.

If support for XP wasn't ending, I doubt we would be upgrading to 7.

I know enterprises doesn't upgrade until they have to, but being that Windows 7 was so solid, they got little backlash when they terminated support for XP. I could see that going very differently.

Windows 7 support officially ends in January of 2015. (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-U.../lifecycle)

Here is to hoping Windows will have an enterprise friendly OS out soon that can be tested and ready to move in for Windows 7.

Yea, I've used Windows 8, for an IT Professional it just wastes time. It might be fine for you, the guy who only uses slickdeals and facebook.



How dare you insult me in that fashion.