60% of companies plan to skip Windows 7
reuters.com
reuters.com
It seems "only human" for people to cut back and save when the economy is bad, but unfortunately that is also the wrong thing to do in order for the economy to recover, and the wrong way to reboot a business. Now is exactly the time for companies to be investing in their futures, and I.T. is one of those major spending areas. With smart spending today, they could be extremely well positioned in a year or two.
A related problem is that I've yet to witness an I.T. group that operates incrementally, or in a parallel testing fashion; it seems that everything has to become a snowball in order to happen at all.
There are ways to make upgrades perfectly safe, and achievable over a longer period of time when resources are scarce. For example, machines could be upgraded a few at a time in isolation (ideally with a production-like parallel test environment), starting with the more experienced users. And, the culture could evolve to commit to incremental improvements in business applications on a regular basis, so that change is expected instead of being some rare event that scares everyone and threatens to tear the company apart at the seams.
For instance, you tell the vendor that your entire site upgrade is contingent on having access to betas, previews, or some limited number of licenses for X number of months so that you may port and test your internal applications. This is hardly an uncommon problem when upgrading, and it's a good bet for a software vendor to allow small samples for a short period in order to enable larger purchases.
It also doesn't hurt to remind vendors of what you could be doing instead of putting up with them. Tell Microsoft you'll virtualize all of Windows on Mac OS X. Tell them you've been impressed lately by OpenOffice 3. It doesn't even matter if you have a real intention to switch, they just have to believe that you will.
I know this is what the newspapers say, but it's not clear to me that it's true. Saving implies that someone out there is paying interest for the privilege of using your money, and that in your own opinion, whatever they're doing is a better use than whatever you'd be spending it on if you had to spend it. Saying you should spend instead of save to help the economy sounds like saying you should deliberately lose money (if you thought it would make more money, you'd be doing it already, right?) to help other people make it... that is, you should be a charity.
Frankly, I'm surprised 40% would even consider a project of that size.
Although I'm not sure what percentage of companies have skipped entire generations of Windows, previously, to make an actually meaningful comparison.
Market share isn't a metric of how many people are using Microsofts latest OS compared to other vendors. It's how many people are using Windows (any version) vs other vendors.
"60% of companies say XP is good enough for their purposes."
We could get into whether Windows 7 is compelling or not, but perhaps for what most companies need done, XP does it.
They'd have to end the support on XP first to get people to upgrade to Vista before such a threat would make sense.
August 4, 2014 is still some time away and anybody that doesn't like spending big $ on license fees supporting a large number of desktops or servers is looking forward to that day with a lot of fear.
For every x number of 'skippers' there is a number of users that will never come back.
Most upgrade cycles are initiated by a perceived lack of future compatibility in a fairly imminent time frame. If compatibility is expected indefinitely, there just isn't an incentive.
Enterprise-scale rollouts for new software are never as simple as "putting the disc in the machine and waiting".
* More granular user access control
* Win left and right for easy split screen, a feature Mac and Ubuntu could both do with.
* Proper DPI scaling, for nearly all apps, with full crispness. My eyes aren't great and this is really helpful.
* Updated Powershell UI with method browsing etc. built in.
The only thing Windows has going for it is proper DPI scaling for all apps. Everything else is just Windows playing catchup with technologies that have been deployed on Unix systems for years.
Also realize that half of the features you mention have to do with driver support, and nothing with the actual engineering of the OS. Just becuase Microsoft can use its clout to force vendors to write dirvers for its OS doesn't say anything about the OS itself.
Also no Unix has a shell with object pipelining. Ie, you can run 'ps | where starttime < 2 hours' on Unix, you'd need to screenscrape using regexs (ie, sed / awk / etc). Powershell provides a separation between presentation and data that's quite refreshing. There are nix equivalents of this concept, they they're unstable and have very few commands available.
There is not a single driver on Unix, proprietary or OSS, that provides proper perfectly crisp DPI scaling for all applications in X. Nor do I believe this would be handled at the driver layer, but more the GTK (or QT etc) layer as it is for MFC in Windows.
Neither granular access control, object pipelining, or application DPI scaling are driver related.
It's likely one of the less common window managers implements something similar, but GNOME, XFCE and KDE do not (and to use those other window managers, you'd lose support for freedesktop.org shortcut files and have to recreate your menus).
So far, the only thing that seems to make a dent is a system that allows virtualization of Windows. If you want to help rid the world of Windows, then you need to start there: build perfect compatibility in a sandbox, while making something obviously superior that runs outside the sandbox.