I wouldn't chalk this up as just a competitive response to the relatively low price Apple charges for its OS upgrades. I think Microsoft really wants/needs to accelerate the adoption of Windows 8 even if that means taking a hit on license fees. Whatever they can do to accelerate adoption of W8 in the enterprise and consumer markets will more than pay off in the long-term. A major reduction in legacy support requirements, enables them to innovate faster and will help improve the Windows brand that has been tarnished over the past decade. They essentially bet the farm on W8 being multi-platform at the core and need people to upgrade.
My guess is that it will take a long, long time for enterprises to move to Windows 8, with most sticking with Windows 7 for as long as Microsoft continues to provide security patches for it. If you're an enterprise with 10000 or 50000 non-technical users running Windows 7, the cost of moving to Windows 8 will be primarily IT staff hours, including all the support questions from users puzzled by the new user interface. What compelling benefits would there be for a bank or insurance company to move to Windows 8 that would offset the steep costs?
Microsoft is eyeing consumers with this announcement, and once consumers switch, they will adapt to the new interface. Once consumers adapt to the new interface, the overhead that you are talking about decreases, and companies can roll out Windows 8 without totally killing productivity.
MS is betting the house on Windows 8, but they know there will be growing pains. This $40 upgrade strategy is one way to mitigate the risk of alienating corporations by driving adoption in the existing consumer market.
And what's to say that consumers will switch? It's not like the PC market is experiencing any growth. Sure consumers who feel they have to own a Windows PC will upgrade when they're existing hardware dies, but I'm skeptical that users will be queuing up to by a Windows 8 PC on launch day. And home users just don't upgrade existing hardware in any meaningful quantity.
Yes, when you combine a non-PC (the iPad) with the PC market there is growth. When you subtract the non-PC from the "PC market" there is negative growth. Trying to make the iPad's success somehow a sign that the PC market is growing is the funniest thing I've read on HN to date.
And sure, the Surface might invigorate Microsoft, and prove a worthy competitor to the iPad, both in terms of sales, as well as in terms of capability and usability. But regardless of whether it succeeds, it has no bearing on growing the PC market, nor on whether current users of PCs will upgrade to Windows 8.
The lines will blur anyway. A Microsoft Surface combined with a TypeCover (assuming it works well), could be used as both a tablet and a laptop at different times. Does it then contribute to PC sales or tablet sales?
Form factor is generally insignificant; there's a big difference between a laptop or a workstation but you would still call them both PCs, even though the working patterns with each are quite different.
The important difference is 'internet/media consumption device' (iPad) vs. 'general computing and productivity device' (PC, Surface?). I believe the growth and shrinkage of their respective markets indicate the typical consumer's desires.
Blurring is what Microsoft hopes to happen. But I don't see any evidence that this hope will be satisfied. It's like crossing a camel with an ostrich and hoping it can fly.
Microsoft failed in previous tablet efforts by trying to graft the desktop environment onto a touchscreen. Failed miserably, and not because of hardware immaturity. In contrast, Apple has succeeded immensely by discarding the desktop metaphor and embracing the touch environment exclusively. Microsoft is trying to straddle the two environments solely to prop up Windows, not because it's a better UX. This to me, dooms it to failure, just as Microsoft failed in its previous tablet ventures.
PC market as viewed separate from tablet market is not experience much growth but when combined, they are growing. Don't forget that Microsoft is targeting the tablet market with this release as well.
What on earth are you talking about? This like saying "Linux doesn't have a very big stake on the desktop, but if you include its competitor windows, then its stake is pretty large".
The reason tablets are separated from the PC market is because tablets are a different and competing product! And make no mistake, this OS price is not for tablets. What Metro tablet am I going to buy that doesn't... have metro on it?
I'm a lawyer, not IT, so my answer may not be all that useful. That said, there are two major hurdles at law firms. First, the management structure is ridiculously flat, and the people running the show are usually the most senior attorneys. Just so happens, those are the people least likely to be using the technology.
Second, most of our software is custom/old-as-dirt. Upgrades require direct participation of vendors who have us over a barrel, and for that reason, no incentive to move quickly. It's an extremely painful/slow/expensive process.
IMHO - Big Law is due for disruption in this area. NetDocuments appears to be making some headway. Unfortunately, lawyers and, thus, law firms, are extraordinarily risk averse. Startups will have difficulty capturing this market.
The number one thing is to make sure that all of the software is compatible without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. Law firms are notorious for using OLD software.
> The number one thing is to make sure that all of the software is compatible without having to jump through a bunch of hoops.
This is the killer. I'm part of a large (6,000+; 1000+ in my state alone) engineering firm; our IS team are currently about to roll out Win7 at the end of the month. We have a lot of software—particularly drafting and modelling software—that we rely on (with few alternatives), and all of their related plugins.
It's not that we don't want to move forward, but the cost of buying new tools (that may not be compatible with our clients'), re-training staff, etc - is possibly greater in terms of lost productivity than just dealing with XP.
Hardware isn't a problem though, as any PC from the last 5-6 years can run Win7 in an "office" environment; a bit less if you need to run modelling software. We usually upgrade on a 2-3 year cycle and a lot of staff are now moving from C2D/4GB/HDD machines to i5/8GB/SSD machines. Everyone loves the SSD's.
I can give an in-depth explanation for migrating from Windows 2000 to Windows XP for a similar number of computers when I was a network admin at a school.
One of the initial blockers was hardware - we were updating our computers in cycles rather than all at once, so many of them were simply not powerful enough to run Windows XP. You could easily forsee a delay of several years due to this alone.
Then you have the domain controllers. We actually stuck with Windows 2000 Server on them for a while, but really they should have been upgraded to server 2003 to be properly managing Windows XP clients. Upgrading the server OS means training your network admin staff, moving over any configuration or scripting that relies on deprecated things, re-creating your software deployment chain to use the latest features available to you, and so on. For us this was maybe a couple of man months of work.
Upgrading the server OS in the MS stack typically means you're simultaneously upgrading a lot of the other software too, such as the email server, so there's all the testing you would expect from such an initiative.
Next you need to re-create your base image that will get installed on all the computers. This could require months of testing because it's quite hard to get a base image running on all of your computers if they aren't identical hardware. This part also covers the sort of things you would expect in doing an upgrade on your personal computer, such as finding new device drivers (probably not an issue going from Windows 7 to Windows 8). I think this part took us 5 or 6 iterations, which worked out as about one man month of work.
Also on the desktop side your admins have to know how to use the new OS - a lot of the control panel changed in XP for example so we had to learn all that. (Of course by this time XP had been out a while and we knew most of it quite well already)
Once you have a working base image you need to update your group policy, as a new OS brings new settings, so you have to ensure everything is suitably locked down.
Then you have to actually test doing mass roll-outs of that image and applying the policy and make sure it works across your entire spectrum of hardware (multiplied by number of policies you have if they differ across some hardware, multiplied again by differing user policies).
Next up is making sure all your software actually deploys correctly on your new images. This is a great opportunity to upgrade to the latest versions of any software that's lagging behind a little (which may well be necessary if any of your software fails to run on the new OS). This was probably the most tedious and frustrating part, especially when applications aren't available as .msi installers as that makes the process for deploying them far lengthier.
Then of course you need to test all the software you deploy to make sure it still works.
Finally you can train users, decide on a good downtime window to do the deployment (and make sure you have a rollback plan for when it inevitably goes wrong), and then roll it out!
So, three years after its release, Win7 has finally begun to overtake WinXP, an 11 year old operating system. And this article is quick to point out that Win7 may not yet have a true majority of PC users yet.
Who said anything about Windows 7 being adopted quickly? I was calling out the wrong information that OP was spreading about many people not having left XP.
Err, 30% market share (potentially more based on methodology) and remaining the second most widely installed OS (or even the first based on methodology) sounds like an awful lot of "people not having left XP."
You posted a link that purported to dispute the OP's idea that users were still on XP. Yet the link you posted actually reinforced that a huge number were still on XP...
XP has an end of extended support date of a little less than 2 years now. Large corporation have either moved or are planning to move to 7. They won't jump straight to 8 due to needing to wait for the first SP and all that.
I don't disagree with you, but this is the exact argument I've heard with every Microsoft OS since windows 2000 (and no doubt it was made before then, too).
This time around though 7 is unbeatable. It just works. Okay it does (and never was) working as I wanted to be - much like linux, osx, etc. but aside from mine developer's perspective it just works for the rest of the stuff.
7 in terms of stability perception is like XP - I still have XP on my Mac Book dual-camped partition.
And we had real problems with Vista - rendering, certain apps not working, slowness overall.
IIRC there's some genuine awesome improvements for Win8. For example, file copying from a share/network is immensely better. I do this at work all the time.
:) Discussing ever-changing authentication schemes alone could (and does) fill a book. Then protocol changes. Discovery changes. UI changes. Better feedback on copy/delete performance. Pause/resume. Syncing and replication schemes. Performance tweaks. Metadata preservation. Filesystem specific concerns. And this is all before you step outside of the Windows world.
What happens if the stream is interrupted? How long do you wait for it to start? When do you tell the user? What do you tell the user? What options do you give them? Do they even care? What if the disk you're writing to disappears? What if you're doing multiple files but only one of them fails? What if power cuts in the middle of a transfer? What if the destination directory gets renamed? What if the destination volume gets renamed? What if the write speed goes into a hole because the SSD decided now was a good time to start page compaction but the inbound data keeps piling up? What happens if the metadata doesn't come over correctly or is missing? When do you submit the arriving file for indexing? When do you submit the arriving file for security scanning?
Nothing is straightforward in software. It takes a lot of work to make it look easy.
Shouldn't all these problems be dealt with at the filesystem level? I mean, if your filesystem browser needs to be aware of file indexing and anti-malware, you are doing it very wrong.
2000 was a real leap forward. Everything since wasn't. I'd still be running windows 2000 if it ran on my hardware (and my software ran on it). I've never directly paid for a post-2000 version of windows, only got it on new hardware.
I beleive its both. If they are going to live up to their promise of more frequent, smaller OS versions then they'd have to come in at a lower price. Lets hope this is the beginning of a trend.
