Microsoft Trying To Woo Businesses To Windows 8 442
jfruh writes "Windows 8 is the most radical rewrite of Microsoft's operating system in decades — and most of the changes are aimed at consumers and new tablet form-factors. Meanwhile, corporate IT is deeply suspicious. Over at Microsoft TechEd Europe, the company is gamely trying to explain to enterprises why they should switch, with easy-to-write enterprise apps and the ability to stream server-side x86 apps to Windows RT. Not everyone is convinced."
Because IT Deptartments are Conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
Good reason to be wary (Score:5, Insightful)
With radical rewrites come lots of new bugs - and lots of sysadmins whose years of experience may not translate. For corporate IT, both of those make Win8 a "go slow" proposition - at best.
Re:Because IT Deptartments are Conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
And it took forever for IT departments to switch off of NT4 or 2K to XP.
Microsoft's biggest competition is its older versions.
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BMO
You would think (Score:5, Insightful)
that every business in the entire world would have enough sense to know that the corporate environment is not a place to be using the bleeding edge of software versions, no matter how much wooing they get.
Re:Because IT Deptartments are Conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
Secure boot isn't meant to kill off linux. It's meant to kill off XP
Considering the number of companies still on XP... (Score:5, Insightful)
... it's amazing how Microsoft still doesn't really get it. Business doesn't really need Metro. There's entire indistries that still get their bread and butter from CLI-based apps (insurance and travel immediately come to mind as does various medical professions) so what advantage does 8 have for them? As stated in the article, unless there's a way to skip Metro all together, many helpdesk staffers will get pissed from fielding many calls asking "Where's my desktop at?".
Were I a CTO or even just an IT manager, I'd go for 7 on the next refresh and give 8 time to mature.
Biggest mistake in Microsoft's history (Score:3, Insightful)
Turning Windows into a Fisher Price toy is about the only possible way Balmer could have found to dismantle Microsoft's business monopoly in record time. I am impressed and the words "burning platform" come to mind.
Hardly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's be honest. This has been said with each new version of Windows. Personally, I was sure that Vista would be the opening that Linux needed to make serious inroads on the desktop, but I was wrong. Many thought that XP's Fisher Price looking default theme and clunky performance (initially) was enough to woo consumers over to Linux, but this didn't happen. I don't see it happening with Win8, especially if Microsoft relents and gives users a way to boot directly to the desktop instead of Metro.
If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It (Yet.) (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft will have a tough sell when it comes to Win8 with many if not most of their large customers.
First all, while they are still the preferred desktop OS vendor, their reputation precedes them: new releases of Windows often come with a seemingly built-in period where problems and flaws need to be worked out -- most of the time by the first service pack, others, not until the second or later. That in turn means lowered productivity across the userbase and increased support costs. To make things worse, often times the answer from even the highest levels of Microsoft's support is "that will be fixed in the next service pack" and the problem is left open. Companies know this and have learned to wait.
Secondly, Microsoft has a bad habit of changing the way their OS works, and that leads to lower productivity thanks to users "having to look" for features and controls they previously knew how to find. Win7 did it, as did Vista and to a smaller extent XP. That even affects the support groups, as they too have to climb up a new learning curve. Companies have learned this too and often wait until they are familiar with the new OS -- sometimes using their own staff as guinea pigs for the desk-side support guys.
Finally, Microsoft's upgrades -- and anyone's really -- have a way of breaking legacy applications that are critical to the business's needs. Then there are vendors who have not certified the new Microsoft OS as being compatible with their products. No certification, no support. No support, it doesn't get fixed and that leaves the business without a piece of its business process software working correctly. Companies have learned this as well and have learned how to wait.
All in all, the conservatism of IT groups is a learned behavior, and if Microsoft has problems selling their OS upgrades because of this, a large part of it is their own doing.
I see help desk hell with the new GUI and even say (Score:4, Insightful)
I see help desk hell with the new GUI and even say you have some full screen metro apps the switching will be jarring to some people as well.
RemoteApp - MS's solution to MS's problem (Score:5, Insightful)
RT devices can't run x86 apps. Microsoft says "No problem! Use RemoteApp to stream x86 apps to your device!" But given how licenses work, this isn't saving you any money on software - and now you need two pieces of hardware (the remote device and a server) to run apps that used to live on the remote device.
So basically Microsoft's decisions created a new problem, and they're trying to pretend their work-around should count as a feature.
Enough probs with Win7 mostly (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, there's a mix of Win 7 32bit and 64bit distributions and the 32bit and 64 bit MS Office distros as well, some of which literally require you to recode macros into Visual Basic "just because".
We don't have time to add Win 8 just because some tablets might use it, especially since pretty much everyone is using iPad or iPhone instead.
Wake me up when Zune 2 is dead and the Tablet Wars are over - cause all my metrics show Apple is winning that one hands down, and we have to work with the VA, not some artificial version of reality where the Zune on steroids is a reasonable option.
MS is high. (Score:5, Insightful)
Business doesn't like radical rewrites of the OS. People like MS because it's consistent. Everyone still isn't over the Windows vista/7 issue. No one is going to buy windows 8 especially since given the pattern Windows 8 will probably be terrible.
Lets face it...
98 good/ok
98 ME bad
XP Good
Vista bad
Windows 7 Good/ok
We're also not used to upgrading our OS this fast. There's no need for windows 8. People will be happy with windows 7 for years and years. Is that a profit problem for MS? How? They're collecting license fees on every new machine.
As to Metro, touch integration, etc. Careful with that stuff. Annoy enough people with the OS and you're going to get people to install alternative shells or completely jump ship to linux. We don't like radical changes like that. And most worrying MS is dropping a lot of it's backward compatibility. That's not acceptable. If I have to start running lots of custom VMs of windows just to run old software that won't work in new versions of MS. At some point there's no problem with just switching to linux or Mac. It's all the same at a certain point.
So... be careful.
Re:Because IT Deptartments are Conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
nodamnedway (Score:5, Insightful)
We're still mostly on XP, evaluated and decided to skip Vista, and are just now starting to deploy 7. This is because (pay attention, this is important) having the latest and greatest cutting edge bits on the desktop is waaaayyyyyy down on the list of things a business looks for in a personal computer environment. Reliability, (Windows 8 service pack zero? It is to laugh.) security (ditto), and compatibility (which is, oddly enough, at direct odds with the concept of "complete rewrite") are MUCH more important factors than having whatever MSFT thinks is the latest whiz-bang interface. It comes down to this: What worked yesterday is more likely to work today than something that came out today. Windows 8 may be, despite being an even numbered release, the greatest thing since sliced milk. But the responsible thing to do is wait and see, let someone else take the chances, and make the decision when the environment is proven. If that means MSFT doesn't meet their 4Q sales, then they should have known better.
Metro? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, clue me in. I really need to know this. Why would I make a Metro app, which only runs on Windows 8, especially a client/server app as described in TFA, when I can make a web app that runs in any environment that has a web browser? What is the percentage in coding to a single, specialized environment when everyone else in the world is coding using mature cross-platform web-based solutions. Wouldn't coding to Metro be a really good way to commit corporate suicide?
Re:Because IT Deptartments are Conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not convinced... (Score:5, Insightful)
When they dropped GPO's form RT they killed it for the Enterprise. If I cant control devices on my network, then it really doesnt matter what devices are ON the network. Citrix receiver + Android (or whatever) + Isolated Guest Wireless and Im all set
Re:I am going to push my company to adopt Win8 (Score:3, Insightful)
Year of the Linux desktop: This is how you make it happen.
Unfortunately, this year is the year the Linux desktop imploded, thanks to Gnome 3 and Unity.
Does It Matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Win8 broadens the base, it doesn't replace Win7 (Score:4, Insightful)
In most offices environments, PCs with Windows Vista or Windows 7 are used for MS Office (or some other word processor, email, and calendar suite), web browsing (or accessing company internal web applications), and sometimes other little job or company specific utilities. Windows 8 doesn’t do any of that better, so there’s very little reason for IT organizations to push their companies to adopt Windows 8. What will they say? “The file copy dialogue box is better, and it will be more secure on devices that have an EFI feature your computer doesn’t have, so please accept long periods of downtime and relearn how to use a computer to do simple tasks while meeting your quarterly goals”?
The feature of note for Windows 8 is the ability to run on small, touchscreen devices. None of these new devices have been seen in their shipping form, businesses don’t have any running a previous version of Windows and that will need to be upgraded. The only small, touchscreen devices that business and entrepreneurs have deployed is the iPad*, and it won’t run Windows 8.
Microsoft’s sales office may be looking to license as many Windows 8 keys as it can, perhaps to create the impression of a successful launch. But the adoption of Windows 8 on PCs won’t determine the success of Windows 8, the adoption in the “post PC world” will.
Re:Because IT Deptartments are Conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
That's going to be real damn difficult.
Enterprise still has to buy the damn machines.
When somebody like Dell is told they just had a $250,000 sale fall through because they could not offer machines that can load XP, you will see things change in a big hurry with the manufacturers.
The small guy might not get a lot of input, but when you start buying a thousand machines at a time.... you get your own sales rep. One way or the other, Dell will acquire, force, intimidate, purchase, steal, conjure, whatever the hardware to make those big sales go through.
Microsoft does not dictate hardware. Hardware purchasers dictate hardware directly proportional to volume.
Re:Metro? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that it's still rather far fetched; I was just saying that it's not as complicated as you made it sound initially. HTML5 in Metro was a deliberate bet to get an existing large developer community onboard with minimal need for them to learn anything new, and by letting them easily target Win8 as one of the supported platforms, rather than the only one.
Personally, I don't really see any obvious cases where a Metro app would give any considerable advantage over a web app in a business environment, other than when the device is not "always on" - which these days is vanishingly rare in workplaces, at least for the kinds of devices that'll run Win8. It also supports pinning websites to the Start screen as tiles - much like iOS - but also lets them [msdn.com] specify their own tile image, and provide tile notifications (via polling), which for many apps is all they really want to do. And it's still easier than repackaging it as an HTML5 Windows app.
About the only other thing I can think of where you'd want to make it an app is if you need notifications beyond a simple counter on the tile - i.e. pop-ups. Other browsers already offer some form of those, most notably Chrome; if you start adding support for that, it should be trivial to also add support when running as a Metro app.
Re:Fat chance. (Score:2, Insightful)
You'll change your tune soon enough when Microsoft accelerates their deadline for dropping support for 7 and forces everyone to migrate to Win8, codenamed "Jar-Jar".
Hasn't shipped+unproven = winner (Score:4, Insightful)
8 hasn't yet shipped and hasn't proven itself capable of running "real business stuff" and they already want to cram it down the throats of corporate buyers?
Where I work, our IT team is still slowly migrating to Windows 7, having only recently halted Vista installs. New PCs are all Windows 7. Because we're more interested in having employees get billable work done instead of calling for IT support because some app is broken. Where it's been deployed, 7 is working fine. Our workers know how to use it. No issues.
I've played with 8. It seems geared for people who have never learned how to use Windows -except all of us worker bees have, in fact, done that. Our jobs depend on doing work. Not doing work differently, with tiles. Just because someone decided that was the way to go. I am sure it's a fine OS and there are valid reasons for every change. But we don't want change. At all. 7 works. Why change?
Frankly, a lot of people are still unhappy with the whimsical way Office 2007 and 2010 moved things around. They're trying to compose a document and can't find the control they used to be able to find. They are wasting time sorting it out and getting upset. The user impression -correct or not- is that stuff changed in Office just for kicks. And if they got their hands on 8, where stuff is "just changed" we would expect the same complaints.
With that in mind, and once again because Windows 7 is just pretty darn good, we're not looking seriously at 8. Maybe 9. We think we can hold on for that long, barring some sort of 8 miracle feature we've yet to hear about.
In my personal home network is four PCs running 7 and one Mac. Outside of a VM to play with, 8 doesn't fit with what I need or want to do. Shrug.
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Re:Fat chance. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that kind of logic is that it results in things like screens that are no longer information-dense. When I want to look at my list of emails I want to see 50 messages on it, with a list of 50 folders, and a half-screen preview as well. No big deal if you assume a mouse, since you can make each message about 3mm high which is still readable and easy to hit with a mouse.
When you design something for a touch-screen you inevitably end up making everything big. So, now my list has 10 items on it, so I'm constantly scrolling. Usually touch-screen interfaces end up with flinging scrolls at that which means that it is hard to scan stuff as I scroll - if I'm just jumping by discrete pages I can watch one spot and see where I'm at.
I guess I'm not the target audience, but I just don't see how I'd get work done on a tablet-like OS. I can see how they're great for blasting through an inbox, or viewing content. However, for the other 90% of people who have an income and have to actually create stuff, I don't see how it helps. Most of the people I see gawking over tablets are either managers at work (who don't actually create stuff), teenagers (who don't create stuff), or ordinary people for home / entertainment use (they do create stuff, but that isn't what they're using their tablets for). I've got no problems with the fact that a TV or XBox isn't great for word processing or spreadsheets, since that isn't their purpose.
I know that executives like growth, and tablets are a growth market. However, there are still FAR more PCs than tablets, and those bottom lines won't be looking so good if they gut their PC market to gain tablets, unless they can control prices enough to charge MUCH more.