"Or maybe somebody at MS should look at why is is many peoples and organisations preference to stay with XP"

Most obvious answer, it's all they need to get the job done.

Company I worked for ran for decades on an IBM System 36 with MAPICS until the mid 1980s. Any desktop PC of the time had more of everything.but the old clunker was all we needed. By comprison when we did upgrade to SAP what a nightmare.

Bob.

> "Most obvious answer, it's all they need to get the job done."

I was just going to say the same thing Bob. If it ain't broken... why fix it?

The same thing is going to happen with Windows 8. It offers absolutely no benefits for customers who have Windows 7 so why upgrade. I'm sure many won't and Windows 7 will become the new XP lasting far longer than Microsoft ever hoped it would because Microsoft has nothing better to offer.

~jr

One advantage I have seen claimed for Win 8 over Win 7 is that it runs a bit faster.

Can anybody confirm or contradict that statement?

For business there is another option that can be very appealing. Many question whether having a full-blown PC with O/S and applications installed locally makes any sense. Many organizations are considering thin-clients, where the applications run on a server and the user device has minimal intelligence. I know this concept doesn't appeal to many in this forum, including myself, because NLEs and other heavy duty applications such as CAD benefit from powerful local hardware.

From the point of view of a company that must maintain a Help Desk and a field force to deal with the hardware and software issues one workstation at a time, the cost can be very high. This doesn't even take into account the hardware and software cost of all the PCs or MACs.

As I said, I'm probably on the the wrong side of this argument, but I understand it and have some sympathy for large organizations. My 4 year old PC at my corporate job runs on XP and though I was dissatified with the confuration from day one, the hardware burden to upgrade it or buy another one to run Windows 7 (or 8) adds up to real money to the company. If the migraton to Windows 7 or 8 slowed, it wouldn't surprise me.

As IT Program manager for Fortune 500 companies, I have installed many thin-client networks. These sort of systems builds do save corporate money and in the end the whole track for thin-client networks is different than networking full build workstations. For that reason Microsoft has for years kept that track support going independently amidst the hullabaloo over consumer PC's getting the latest version of a desktop OS.

Let's say it is 80% of all (linux, windows, mac) are WinXP.

I'd say the other 20% is what drives the market. 20% is still a HUGE number of hundreds of millions of users.

Wikipedia says there's 70 million XBox 360's out there, ~70 million PS3's & ~97 million Wii's.

If you sold a game to only 20% of that user base (237mil) that's 47.4 MILLION COPIES. @ $50/pop that's $2.3 *BILLION*. Companies sell hundreds of thousands or millions, not tens of millions. Cod: Black Ops 2 sold ~7.5 million on release. That is ridiculously high for a video game, most really good releases sell in the hundreds of thousands. Activision only sold to *6.3*% of console owners (Wii U has ~2 million sold, estimated).

So 20% not using XP quite possible makes more $$ for MS in a year (and everyone else) then the other 80% do in a decade. It's also a very good chance that 5% of those computer users spend majority of the money of software & hardware every year.

The other 80% are just the equivalent of a dumb terminal and are most likely used as a glorified typewriter and for checking e-mail.

In my 30 years in IT i've seen the paradigm shift from local PC to thin client to local PC to thin client ... etc more times than i can remember. Every time the shift was heralded as the salvation of the computer industry and accompanied by volumes of explanations of why X was so much better than Y, only to be followed a few years later with explanations of why Y was so much better than X. Ludicrous.

Honestly, i don't see there ever being a schism again. High end local PCs with more power than was dreamed possible 10 years ago cost a fraction of what thin clients used to cost.* Local PCs can be a client for almost any centralized application. It doesn't make sense to buy dedicated thin client hardware, when your handy cheap commodity PC can do the best of both worlds right out of the box.

*The last time a system integrator tried to push client terminals on us, they were offering them to us for $850 in quantity, while we were buying stock PCs for $550. All their literature praised the "cost effectiveness" of thin clients.

"It doesn't make sense to buy dedicated thin client hardware, when your handy cheap commodity PC can do the best of both worlds right out of the box."

10 years ago when I left work, the norm across the business was centralized software that updated your PC overnight if need be. The software was installed locally, and ran locally. Everybody had the same version (a little out of date because the powers that be liked to test new versions and wait for bugs to be minimal).

Power users also had Linux boxes for their real work.

It's all shifting as it always has and always will do,

From what I've seen, IE dominance and lock down in enterprise is one the decline (at last!) because of the commoditisation of of IT in general meaning more day to day resources being hosted externally and being externally facing. + the increase in BYOD means developers can't get away with targeting specific OS / Browsers any more in the enterprise like lots used to.

I think this will be the the last big OS change and over the next 10 years it's going to shift to BYOD and virtulisation, it's always going to be late changing OS if you've got say something common like 100,000 + people on custom managed XP builds, you're not going to be jumping every time a new OS comes out, would cost a fortune in testing time and licensing and introduce risk + unless you happen to be in the business of OS who cares, it's the apps that you need to run and with those moving external as well even that's becoming less of an issue.

So IMO over the next 5 - 10 years, everything that's a commodity goes externally managed as people get more comfortable with the idea, global country policies around data retention and privacy start to align and security is proven. What's left in house is anything that gives you competitive advantage / is just too high risk to trust with someone else.

and I didn't mention cloud once, ohh we can host stuff externally and ramp it up and down, been doing that for years it's the Internet! just getting better at it :)

> "One advantage I have seen claimed for Win 8 over Win 7 is that it runs a bit faster."

I can neither confirm nor deny since I only run Windows 8 in a virtual machine for testing but I wonder how much of that claim is due to the fact that:

(A) Windows 8 desktop does not use Aero and Aero makes the GUI slow so would disabling Aero in Windows 7 be just as fast as Windows 8?

and

(B) Every Windows PC since the invention of the registry runs faster on day 1 than day 101 because Windows PC's slow down over time due to a poor OS design (e.g., simply re-installing Windows 7 makes your PC run faster)

So the real question is: Does Windows 8 run faster than a brand new Windows 7 PC with Aero disabled? (I'm guessing no but i could be wrong)

~jr

"So the real question is: Does Windows 8 run faster than a brand new Windows 7 PC with Aero disabled? (I'm guessing no but i could be wrong)"

Interesting theory; I had not thought of that. Is Aero not even offered as part of Win 8?

I toiled many years at Fortune 500 firms in the US. Inertia and conservatism do indeed drive the IT strategy, although that is starting to change.

It was just five years ago that my employer upgraded its 25,000 machines from Windows 2000 to XP. Part of the holdup was several mission critical systems they had developed in-house (high speed, real-time manufacturing visibility systems), that just would not run on XP. It took a long time to port them over. Then Win 7 hit, and the advance team found the same systems were struggling again, so still no upgrade to Win 7.

Like many other firms, they had outsourced a lot of stuff to India and the Phillipines, but are now realizing that almost all of it is mission critical, and they are bringing much of it back in-house. The increased cost of doing business outweighs the short-term savings.

I have watched the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" strategy fail in the long term again and again as nimble, innovative competitors enter a firm's business space. And IT is more and more part of the whole business - with embedded processors and loads of software throughout the product line. One wag joked at the auto show that cars had just become networked computers in steel boxes with wheels on the corners.

As an aside, have you seen the commercial for Nissan for the car that beeps the horn when you have properly inflated a tire? This cost almost nothing to do - the pressure sensors are already on board (tire pressure monitoring), the horn is already there, just a couple of hundred lines of code - is car stationary, is tire pressure increasing, send a signal to horn on the Canbus.

Another example of sensor application evolving: What started out as a simple backup camera has become lane drift monitoring, cross-path backup warning, overtaking traffic monitoring, obstructed path monitoring, etc., etc., etc. And I am sure we will see more and more of that. Imagine, real time video processing in a car. If this were happening in a desktop application, we would call it feature-bloat.

There's not a lot to add except to reiterate that big business' adoption of a new version of software doesn't have much to do with the quality or lack of quality of that software. If you've got more than 2 seats then upgrades start to be less appealing. At 200,000 seats...it's just not likely you'd reach a consensus among all the stakeholders.

It's much easier for single players to update their software. For example, I personally have a CS6 Master Suite at home but my workplace provides me with CS4 applications. I have to be very careful about what I do at home to make sure I can open the files at work. Similarly, if we use a freelancer for a short job it's likely they'll be ahead of us in their software versions.

On top of that, the website I used to create content for for our main client was largely serviced in Dreamweaver. The site was so old and standards-poor that I had to stop at DW-CS3. Newer versions of Dreamweaver just insisted on doing things "right" and weren't compatible with a site that did everything "wrong". At 20-30k pages and no budget to rebuild the site, we just had to freeze the tools we used. It's things like this that keep companies from upgrading software.

Rob

I'm in IT and we are probably 80% XP still. some laptops on 7, mostly thin clients runing an XP interface from a server.
Can't see a reason to have to upgrade $200 each seat eery year when everything is working fine.

"Another example of sensor application evolving: What started out as a simple backup camera has become lane drift monitoring, cross-path backup warning, overtaking traffic monitoring, obstructed path monitoring, etc., etc., etc. And I am sure we will see more and more of that. Imagine, real time video processing in a car. If this were happening in a desktop application, we would call it feature-bloat."

Remind me never to buy a car that has implemented the cutting edge technology of off-loading the engine ignition control calculations to the backup camera computer GPU. ;-)

Or does it merely boot or start apps faster ?

geoff

"Remind me never to buy a car that has implemented the cutting edge technology of off-loading the engine ignition control calculations to the backup camera computer GPU."

Probably a good idea to look for a car that has a few lines of code in the engine control to do "brake override", too.

"Is Aero not even offered as part of Win 8?"

Why would anyone even want it? It's a hog, it slows the computer down, it's confusing, and it's downright ugly. I've disabled it on many friends' & cow-orkers' computers, and always received a resounding "oh thank you! that's soooo much better now."

"This cost almost nothing to do - the pressure sensors are already on board (tire pressure monitoring), the horn is already there, just a couple of hundred lines of code"

Isn't it exciting?! A major portion of my dayjob's product offering is providing value-added processing to other company's data streams. We earn a lot of extra business when potential customers ask us to provide a certain feature set that one of our competitors offers, and we get to tell them "yes, and not only that, but here's a few dozen other business intelligence enhancements we can toss in the package as well." When they wonder how we can do that we explain that the necessary data is already there, all we have to do is add some extra code we already have to mine all the additional correlations and report them. It's amazing how much more useful information can be pulled out of what already exists.