The Real Reason China Banned Microsoft Windows 8

It's too expensive to migrate all the Chinese government-owned workstations from Windows XP to Windows 8 - to face the prospect of having to do it again in a few years. Many European governments have attempted to abandon Windows with mixed success. It takes a lot of planning, effort and cost and no one knows whether any financial benefits will be realized. They don't even know whether they'll be able to get off the upgrade treadmill.

On the other hand if you're going to make the switch now is a really good time. There's a lot of flexibility to be had by replacing aging client/server applications tied to Windows XP with apps having a web front-end. It's a smart move to not tie yourself to a specific client and focus on "any device, any time." We'll see how this plays out.