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> MS and Intel then start a marketing blitz in those IT departments, hey, enterprise, we love and understand you. Cool, IT guys fall for it.

Serious question here; is it that much different in the US? At 'big whatever' I have been in the EU (besides, strangely enough(?), France), the 'IT guys' don't like Windows/MS and would not choose it if it was up to them. I see Ubuntu, BYOD Mac OS X, iOS for management and force-fed Windows (with a lot of complaining).

People working mostly on Excel (or other Office components) would pick Windows, but those are not 'the IT guys'?

My experience is that it's a love/hate relationship. Often the IT management prefers to run with Microsoft if they can because it's already interated into the existing infrastructure. And Microsoft has very good salespeople that can tell these managers how well a new product integrates with their existing Windows platform. Any new platform threatens to add more support and more work and contains lots of unknowns.

The "lower parts" of IT often knows more about the pain points of certain Microsoft products and have more hate then love, or at least are more open to consider alternatives.

Microsoft has a _lot_ of enterprise software that is not easy to replace for a big company, not to mention third party software that runs on Windows. And some of that software works pretty well.

Microsoft screwing up their mobile strategy has now shown the IT departments at most major companies that iOS and Android devices can work just fine, and this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft dominance in the enterprise.

Enterprise IT as in systems for end users (you can call it Commercial IT). The IT guys themselves will not use Win 8 Pro / Surface of course. Just the business users. But Enterprise IT departments make the purchasing decisions.

It all depends on scale. Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it. OS X might, but no one has tried so far. MS Office is the killer here, if you can't run it, you're dead. That's why MS was caught so surprised when the iPad took off, against all logic.

Windows 7 is perfectly suited as an enterprise solution. Based on how many companies still use XP - I think we've got a good 10 more years of use from win 7.

Once it is no longer tenable to use it, you'd better hope microsoft have developed a usable windows version for offices, because I don't think live tiles updating me on my social network is exactly a selling point in an enterprise solution...

Yes, that makes sense. I was thrown of by 'IT guys'. But in 50k employees worldwide corps in the EU at least I see a lot of business guys doing a lot of their work on iPads and Macbooks now. Anecdotal: a few business friends of mine working for energy and pharma now make their presentations on the iPad directly in Keynote and present it from the iPad. They don't touch PPT anymore. The Windows machine (or Macbook) only switches on for Word (hardly ever) or Excel.

Same with finance sector. Everyone has iPads. We spent the majority of the last year optimising our web app so it works nicely on iOS. We're even doing offline apps soon for data collection.

People don't even use Excel now - our platform is powerful enough to cover all of the normal use cases in the financial sector.

I work in the financial sector, 80000+ employees. Office, Visio, Project, Active Directory, SQL Server, Server, etc. all play a huge role in our PC structure and end user environments.

We also have massive IBM deployments including MVS and Unix (z/OS, AIX, DB2, Oracle, etc.) that run most all of the back-end banking.

Microsoft in the front-end, IBM/Unix in the back. Gotta say, the front end, although more complicated, is more easily managed and deployed. I could never see a replacement for it, not yet anyway.

Edit: No, iPads won't play nicely with this setup.

Our guys are mainly in the field so its probably a different model.

> Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it.

Tell that to Google.

> OS X might

For LDAP and Kerberos, OS X is much less configurable than Linux and the number of tools is less. So if Linux is not good enough, how could OS X even stand a chance? Because of Office for Mac? It's much worse than the Windows version, many documents are not rendered correctly, VBA works poorly, especially for Excel, Exchange support is not on par with the Windows version, many features are missing and Mac users hate the program.

You have google docs on the ipad, in fact on anything with an internet connection, which let you import/export office files.

Until Google decides to kill it. Or kill the features you find useful...

This here is the problem with web-based services, and the advantage of Microsoft Office.

If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it.

Of course also the difference is that I paid for MS Office while I haven't paid a cent for Google Docs.

| If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it.

Individuals with that version installed can use it, but you can't get new licenses for more employees, and you won't be able to upgrade to get new features. You might also be wary of applying bugfix patches in case your key feature gets zapped. Also, user support for your feature will dry up eventually.

"Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it" - yep, it costs too much. No... wait, it's free. There's no deployment tools... no... wait, there are... There's no good office softw... nevermind. No one has ever... wait, there's that town in Germany. I give up. Why isn't Ubuntu suitable? It even comes with an RDP client so you can use Windows-only programs remotely...

Arguably management tools for all those devices, but that is very rapidly changing. The real reason is that no body has done it and said "this is how you do it" and not that many IT guys are in a position to decide to try it and take the risk. The only technical reason would be custom apps built for window or .net, otherwise all of the pieces are there to do it for most businesses.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice doesn't work as well as MS Office. Google Docs doesn't replicate all of the functionality that MS Office offers, and doesn't work as well. The productivity difference[1] would easily be worth over $200/person/month for people who use Office a lot.

[1] From features that Google Docs and to a lesser extent, LibreOffice, don't have or work poorly, and speed especially vs Google Docs.

the only area where I can see this as being a problem is with Excel. For the others, use a web-authoring tool. Why create a MB document in Word, to attach to a SharePoint page, then send a link to every pointing out the new document? Excel has some specialized math functions (and data presentation abilities) that are beyond LO/OO. But I think it's such a small percentage of people that need that functionality, you could replace MSO w/ LO/OO and most everyone would say 'meh' and go back to work.

This is hearsay but what I understood is that there is no suitable large scale alternative for MS Active Directory and that it doesn't play well with Linux setups as it does with Windows. I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I would, maybe someone with more experience in this kind of management can chime in.

from personal experience it is a bit harder (or was, last time I checked) to manage file permissions vs Windows. As far as AD, Linux has had LDAP (which AD is based on) for quite a while.

I think all the people that used to be responsible for platform strategy have been fired already. That's part of the problem.

They also botched their enterprise mobile business with the WP7 and now WP8 launch. All my friends working in pretty conservative industries such as oil and banking used to have WM6 or BlackBerry, now they use Android or iOS.

Unless Microsoft pulls out a magic trick, I think they've already lost their dominance. The cat is out of the bag now that all major enterprises allow iOS and Android devices.

"And now add the fact that MS seems to be launching MS Office on iOS soon."

I think this really sums up the long term fate of Microsoft. This happened to Sega several years ago. They eventually gave up on the console business only to focus on software for other consoles. If Microsoft has any chance of long term success, they need to start building apps for iOS and maybe even Android. This is how Sega has survived over the years. They make games for Xbox, Nintendo and Playstation and have even licensed their characters to Nintendo to share the spotlight with their one-time rivals. Microsoft is sinking and they need to start forming some alliances with their one-time rivals.

>On Modern there are guidelines, horizontal swipe and pagination is key. You're used to high information density, utilization of screen real estate to show as much as possible on one screen to avoid a user needing to navigate away? Forget that on Modern UI. Whitespace rules, it is like the GMail redesign on steroids

Hold it there. They are called guidelines [1] because they're guidelines. You don't have to enforce them! That said, they're there for a reason! The reason is that you use your finger on tablets, not a high-precision mouse device. Seriously, have you tried operating Excel on a touch device?

Second, who says enterprise apps can't be made with this kind of UI? Some guys succeed [2]. You just have to think new. Of course Office in its current form can't be made for Win RT.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh46542...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/one-dev-at-least-is-doing-g...

well, here it gets tricky. we are working closely with MS, they are guiding us. Visual Studio also only allows you to deviate so much from the UI sets.

then, let's take a look at the BI app you're using as a reference: http://www.pushbi.com/Videos.aspx

Notice how it is all about horizontal scrolling? Looks nice, right? How does the user know, where he is? Each "page" has a different meaning, function, but they are a fluid horizontal canvas. Notice something else? Surface is a 16:9 device, MS is using this as a standard. this emphasis the horizontal even more than the vertical. I am not convinced this works for complex apps with data entry. The BI app is more for consumption, you flip through your reports. Notice how they shoot you out to their online dashboards?

Discoverability is a key issue I have with Modern UI. Some buttons can be exposed directly, but the guidelines are pushing you into button bars which only appear through swipes (from top or from bottom).

Colleagues have tried it with their kids. iOS, Android? No problem for a 4-year old to figure it out. Modern UI? Frustration. And yes, I am comparing the typical business user to a 4 year old when it comes to patience in learning a new UI scheme.

iPad-induced accidental downvote. Apologies.

Yet, iOS has a much higher information density than WinRT and still works very well. Of course you can ignore the guidelines, if _most_ apps follow the guidelines you will end up with a platform that looks very good in product demos but isn't as good to use for actual work.

> MS wants enterprise to adopt Win8 Pro on Intel devices. Which practically all are around 1000$ and have a battery life of 4 hours.

Not all devices will have 4 hours of battery life. For example core i5 Acer Iconia W700 is reported to have 7 hours of battery life by engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/14/acer-iconia-w700-review/. Also intel clover trail is also reported to have good power efficiency. We will know the truth in next 6 month I hope.

> Enterprise IT wants something similar to the iPad, for even cheaper.

Nexus?

Android is yet another different platform. No real upsides, not really enterprisey and not really secure (at least that's the perception).

availabilty in enterprise is key - can I equip a global workforce with exactly the same hardware? local hardware support? Apple and MS can. Nexus not.

Uhm, really? Surface availability is limited to some countries, so good luck with global rollout. Asus (not Google!) on other hand makes N7 available anywhere.