Infographic: Who's making the move to Windows 8?

[Borg 386]

Who's moving to Windows 8

Whether to make the move to Windows 8 is a huge question facing companies right now. TechRepublic conducted an independent survey of over 1,100 tech pros to see where they are on this decision. Here are a few data points from the survey.

Infographic: Who's making the move to Windows 8? | TechRepublic

 

[FuturDreamz]

>_< That's tiny text even when viewing it full size.

 

[mangoh]

>_< That's tiny text even when viewing it full size.

Agreed.

Opening the link on a desktop/laptop shows a more readable image if that is of any help.

Or clicking the image followed by clicking it again so it opens up in a new window and then using the magnifying glass in Chrome anyway.

 

[SIW2]

What is better - it's invisible.

 

[Borg 386]

Shows up OK on mine if you click it once, then click it again & you get the + sign to make it big....that's how it shows up in FF anyway.

I guess you can just click on the website & you should be able to see it OK there

 

[FuturDreamz]

>_< That's tiny text even when viewing it full size.

Agreed.

Opening the link on a desktop/laptop shows a more readable image if that is of any help.

Or clicking the image followed by clicking it again so it opens up in a new window and then using the magnifying glass in Chrome anyway.

That's better. At first i just used the open in webpage option, which isn't big enough.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

It opens fine in IE9. You just have to click on it three times.

 

[Fantail]

Here's the best image I could find that best describes Microsoft's new flamboyant OS.

 

[GEWB]

It opens fine in IE9. You just have to click on it three times.

Or is that click your heels three times? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Regards,
GEWB

 

[Colonel Travis]

28.3% of businesses with 10,000 or more employees plan to upgrade to 8? I find that very hard to believe. My wife's company employs 76,000 and just upgraded to 7 and she wasted half a day just getting the wireless configs straightened out. The rest of her team hasn't even dealt with it and may not be able to make the upgrade to 7 for various reasons that are too boring to explain.

I can't imagine working in IT with 8 deployed and the equivalent population of a small city people emailing at the same time - uh, where's the start button? Multiply the rest of the subsequent headaches by a factor of 500 bazillion.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Click Three Times

>_< That's tiny text even when viewing it full size.

>_< That's tiny text even when viewing it full size.

Agreed.

Opening the link on a desktop/laptop shows a more readable image if that is of any help.

Or clicking the image followed by clicking it again so it opens up in a new window and then using the magnifying glass in Chrome anyway.

You need to click on it three times (it goes to full-size on FF if you do that).

Oops!
I see that other people have already reported that fact.

 

[badtux]

28.3% of businesses with 10,000 or more employees plan to upgrade to 8? I find that very hard to believe.

I find it very hard to believe too. I manage my company's engineering infrastructure and Windows 2012/Windows 8 will be deployed... someday. For one thing, it's a bit harder than just rolling it out. There's a whole infrastructure built around Windows 2008R2 that has to be replaced with a Windows 2012 based infrastructure before you can properly support Windows 8. And our Windows 2008R2 infrastructure is virtual servers on an ESXi 4.1 cluster (which in turn talks to a pair of storage appliances to provide cluster storage), which, uhm, won't run Windows 2012 (need ESXi 5.x for that, which wasn't available at the time I started rolling out the 4.1 cluster). I just finished rolling out the last of the 4.1 cluster on fairly new Nehalem systems pulled from inventory, and those machines will be EOL'ed in, uhm, five years? So... you do the math. Yes, I *will* be deploying Windows 8 -- in five years LOL!

Actually, I've been testing 2012 and Windows 8 since the first previews hit MSDN, to make sure that our software runs on them. They're not as bad as their reputation and do have some real internals improvement that should improve security, performance and power usage, but the Windows 8 UI is a mess. And I'm a long-time Linux geek, so I know disastrous user interfaces when I see them, I've been seeing them on Linux for years .

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

It opens fine in IE9. You just have to click on it three times.

Or is that click your heels three times? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Regards,
GEWB

You forgot to say, "There's no place like home." Now where are those ruby slippers?

 

[Reckless]

I'm going to be using Windows 7 for a while as I'm not liking the Windows 8 styling. It seems to be catering to ipad users and the new touch screen computers. Most Windows users I know will skip this version and possibly buy the next one.

 

[spddemun]

Interesting poll, and I've yet to visit any business, hospital, or doctor's office and see anything except XP running!

What will companies do when XP support ceases?

I didn't do the test of 8, but am trying it now. It is ugly for sure, but runs faster on my machine.

 

[badtux]

Interesting poll, and I've yet to visit any business, hospital, or doctor's office and see anything except XP running!

What will companies do when XP support ceases?

They'll run Windows 7, of course.

You *can* run XP programs on Windows 8, but Windows 8 makes you jump through hoops to do so. I had to even define the installer to run in "compatibility mode" on one program that I tried, I managed to get it installed and working on Windows 8, but it certainly wasn't done easily. For our own product I tested it against the preview and ran into the same issue, so I updated the bundled Java runtime and installer packaging for our September release (which is mostly run on Windows XP/Win2003 but we're moving people off of it as fast as we can to Win7/Win2k8R2) simply because sooner or later a customer will want to install it on Windows 8 and telling him to right-click the installer exe and run it in compatibility mode would cause a support nightmare.

Which tells you that XP is dead (well, almost), but Windows 7 is likely to be around for as long as Windows XP was, because it'll take years before all those old XP programs are updated to newer API's and run seamlessly on Windows 8. Heck, for the software I mention above it happened only because of a fortuitous overlap in development windows where I had the toolbox out and hood open anyhow and only because it's written in Java rather than directly to the Windows API so I could just slip a new Java runtime in behind the scenes (well, not that easy, Java claims to be "write once run anywhere" but I had to fix some things in our software that worked differently under the new runtime, so it turns out Java's claim is BS, sigh!). Now add in certification requirements to the reality of development and deployment windows, and you see why it'll be years before all those old XP programs are running on Win8... but most of them have already been updated to be able to run on Win7. Hmm. No-brainer, eh?

 

[MWRed]

Hell, the IT guy and me are the only people out of about 50 where I work that have 7.....everyone else is still using XP. No plans to upgrade anyone else to 7 either, so 8 is a sure no-go.

 

[SIW2]

I think you are assuming MS will change tack and make something better in the next release.

If win8 does badly - they might.

Or they might not.

Because MS wield monopoly power over the desktop market - they could just keep heading in this direction.

Most consumers can't hang on to their old os forever. At some stage - they will have to buy a new machine. Then they will have to put up with what MS gives them.

It would be much better for everybody if there was a viable alternative os - there is a big market for the taking.

The barriers to entering that market are so huge - MS must have calculated that no one will try.

I'm going to be using Windows 7 for a while as I'm not liking the Windows 8 styling. It seems to be catering to ipad users and the new touch screen computers. Most Windows users I know will skip this version and possibly buy the next one.

 

[Alejandro85]

The interesting thing is that in all aspects more people don't want to move to Win8 and will keep their current OS. The only group with a 50/50 was those using Vista! Casually the worst OS from MS in a long time. No doubt, Win8 is going to be its successor.

What will companies do when XP support ceases?

Those companies using XP will continue to use XP! The fact that MS doesn't supports XP means NOTHING for the user. The already installed system will continue to run exactly the same as before, a crashed system can be reinstalled from the CD in the very same way and programs will continue to work in exactly the same way as before. Frankly, other than buying a new XP licence, I don't care at all of the MS support for anything.

Most consumers can't hang on to their old os forever. At some stage - they will have to buy a new machine. Then they will have to put up with what MS gives them.

Soon or later everyone will want to change his hardware, but that doesn't means changing the OS. Don't forget too that people have a brain on his own and don't simply accept "what MS gives them". Vista was a great example of that, a lot of users simply reformatted back into XP their brand new computer because of the bad OS and Win8 may as well follow the same path.

It would be much better for everybody if there was a viable alternative os - there is a big market for the taking.

There are! Linux and MacOS are the other major systems. Sure, not with the market share of MS, but as more and more software and machines come targeting those systems, their share may increase. But don't think for a minute that the world will blindly obey MS desires so easily.

 

[FuturDreamz]

I think you are assuming MS will change tack and make something better in the next release.

If win8 does badly - they might.

Or they might not.

Because MS wield monopoly power over the desktop market - they could just keep

You have to remember that while Microsoft holds the monopoly of the desktop market, the desktop market does not hold the monopoly of the consumer market.

Currently tablets are becoming even more popular than before, and laptops and other portables are cannibalization desktop sales.