4 ms·

The problem is, people have to upgrade. Eventually, yes, but not any time soon and not necessarily to Windows 10. Our standard in my businesses (which are rel

The problem is, people have to upgrade. Eventually, yes, but not any time soon and not necessarily to Windows 10. Our standard in my businesses (which are relatively small and in tech industries) is still Windows 7. We don't consider Windows 10 a viable option because of the forced updates and telemetry issues, so we'd be looking at alternative platforms if Microsoft decided to dig in. As things stand, neither of those situations looks like changing any time soon; I'm guessing we're not alone, since all of our suppliers still seem to assume Windows 7 by default on new machines, so it will be interesting to see how the likes of Dell put pressure on MS to deliver something they can sell at Windows 7 nears EOL. In our case, Apple gear would be the most obvious switch today. It has viable alternatives for most of the software we need in most areas, and crucially, it already has much better options in some of areas that aren't available on Windows. The hardware itself is relatively expensive, but it's far less expensive than making the wrong choice of platform and a lot of the applications themselves are cheaper, so it's well inside the "acceptable business expense" range. Our view is that going cloud-everything isn't the way forward for us, so we're not particularly interested in those kinds of alternatives. Other businesses will presumably have different needs and priorities, though, and certainly the cloud-based offerings are becoming more competitive with traditional desktop software in a lot of areas for those who can meet their requirements that way and tolerate the disadvantages. If you can move your essential business software to something Web-enabled then it doesn't matter what OS you're running, or potentially even what type of device you're using. And of course if MS do leave a huge vacuum in the mainstream desktop/laptop OS category, someone will surely move to fill it, because there's still an awful lot of money to be made there. I doubt it would be anything like any of the current Linux or BSD distributions, but as we've seen with OS X, Android, SteamOS and others, you can build a lot on top of those platforms with enough resources in the length of time we're talking about here, and certainly there are several heavyweights in tech today who have those resources if they choose to make a move. So you might be right about people having to upgrade eventually, but I think there are likely to be a lot more viable options by that time than you're allowing for here.

freehunter 10y ago
You're exactly right, these are the thoughts that are going through everyone's head. The same thoughts we all had when moving from Windows XP when Vista was the replacement and no one really liked it. Companies I worked with stayed on XP until they literally had no other choice, and then reluctantly moved to Windows 7. One of the biggest features of Windows in the small-medium business and even enterprise markets is backwards compatibility. If you're willing/able to give that up, you are free to switch anywhere. If you can't, you can't. You have to stick with Windows. I work at a major tech company and all of our laptops are Linux. But we also have Windows VMs because we're all required to run Microsoft Office. We're switching to Macs because we can run a non-Windows system but still have Office (with the exception of Visio, unfortunately). "A lot more viable options" exist, except when you need Windows software. In which case, no more viable options will ever exist until a new version of Windows is released. The more likely outcome is Microsoft pushing Windows 10 Enterprise a little harder.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  I'm not sure the XP/7 situation is a good comparison for 7/10 though. In the former case, the main concern was incompatibilities and the general time and money costs of a large-scale software migration. In the latter case, you have the same issues, but on top of those there are compelling reasons not to move to 10 for some organisations. It's not a case of delaying the move as long as possible to avoid incurring the overheads; they actively don't want to make that move at all. I agree about the importance of backward compatibility for Windows itself, but I think compatibility is becoming less compelling as a reason for businesses to stay with Windows. The dangers of lock-in are well understood and a lot of businesses have been changing their IT strategies accordingly for a long time. For example, in the era of XP to 7 transitions a decade or so ago, Office was the de facto standard format for exchanging most information within and between businesses. Today a wide range of online services are used for communication, and the tools for importing and exporting Office files from other software are now adequate for many purposes, and it's unlikely either of those trends will have reversed by 2020 when 7 runs out of support. As of today, my own businesses have only a couple of Windows-only applications left that we rely on for anything fundamental. They are also the biggest pain points in our whole software infrastructure, also supplied by huge developers that have been moving in customer-hostile directions in recent years, and they are also starting to face serious competition from other applications on other platforms. Whether shifting away from Windows forces us to drop those few remaining Windows-only applications or dropping the applications removes the remaining incentives to stay on Windows first, I fully expect that by 2020 we won't be sorry to see any of them go.

freehunter 10y ago

You're exactly right, these are the thoughts that are going through everyone's head. The same thoughts we all had when moving from Windows XP when Vista was the replacement and no one really liked it. Companies I worked with stayed on XP until they literally had no other choice, and then reluctantly moved to Windows 7. One of the biggest features of Windows in the small-medium business and even enterprise markets is backwards compatibility. If you're willing/able to give that up, you are free to switch anywhere. If you can't, you can't. You have to stick with Windows. I work at a major tech company and all of our laptops are Linux. But we also have Windows VMs because we're all required to run Microsoft Office. We're switching to Macs because we can run a non-Windows system but still have Office (with the exception of Visio, unfortunately). "A lot more viable options" exist, except when you need Windows software. In which case, no more viable options will ever exist until a new version of Windows is released. The more likely outcome is Microsoft pushing Windows 10 Enterprise a little harder.

Silhouette 10y ago
I'm not sure the XP/7 situation is a good comparison for 7/10 though. In the former case, the main concern was incompatibilities and the general time and money costs of a large-scale software migration. In the latter case, you have the same issues, but on top of those there are compelling reasons not to move to 10 for some organisations. It's not a case of delaying the move as long as possible to avoid incurring the overheads; they actively don't want to make that move at all. I agree about the importance of backward compatibility for Windows itself, but I think compatibility is becoming less compelling as a reason for businesses to stay with Windows. The dangers of lock-in are well understood and a lot of businesses have been changing their IT strategies accordingly for a long time. For example, in the era of XP to 7 transitions a decade or so ago, Office was the de facto standard format for exchanging most information within and between businesses. Today a wide range of online services are used for communication, and the tools for importing and exporting Office files from other software are now adequate for many purposes, and it's unlikely either of those trends will have reversed by 2020 when 7 runs out of support. As of today, my own businesses have only a couple of Windows-only applications left that we rely on for anything fundamental. They are also the biggest pain points in our whole software infrastructure, also supplied by huge developers that have been moving in customer-hostile directions in recent years, and they are also starting to face serious competition from other applications on other platforms. Whether shifting away from Windows forces us to drop those few remaining Windows-only applications or dropping the applications removes the remaining incentives to stay on Windows first, I fully expect that by 2020 we won't be sorry to see any of them go.