Most companies won’t be early adopters of Windows 8

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There was once a time when the launch of a new Windows operating system was a huge deal for the technology departments in many businesses. Not anymore. Microsoft Corp’s release of Windows 8 on Friday is likely to be a non-event for most companies — and some experts say many may never adopt it.

Microsoft has lost the confidence of its customers — business and personal. You can’t release as much shit as they have over the last decade and expect your customers to keep forgiving you.



  • http://twitter.com/forty2j Jim McPherson

    Erm… I don’t recall this ever being a big deal. My Fortune 500 company has a vast majority installed base of Windows XP and just this year moved off of IE 6.

    • kibbles

      same here…major national bank i worked for, was running XP (still is) and IE6 (now on 8, i believe)

    • Player_16

      I contract a lot here in Australia. 2004-07 it was NT2000 or XP. Now it’s usually XP.

  • http://twitter.com/shycophante Shyco Phante

    I’m LOLing right now. Most companies have never been early adopters of any new version of Windows. Most companies usually get downgrade rights with new licenses just so they can keep using the safe, dependable version of Windows while the guinea pigs (home users) do the real world testing for years. What you have quoted is laughably inaccurate.

    • http://www.thegraphicmac.com/ JimD

      Agreed. I don’t know of any company of any size (Windows or Mac) that upgrades to the latest hardware/software immediately. They usually lag behind by 6 months at minimum.

    • Scruff0

      Completely agree – for large companies Win8 would not be on their radar for ages.

      The sad this I’ve seen is that recently one of the bigger clients we deal with is in the process of completing their Windows Vista ‘tick of approval’ across the company. It’s taken them four years.

    • gjgustav

      Usually IT departments jump on it to test for future deployment, even if it takes 6 months to a year to push out to the rest of the company. The enthusiasm by IT departments this time around is just not there.

  • rj

    I don’t know whether Windows 8 will be a success or not. But the fact that businesses aren’t rolling out Windows 8 immediately means nothing. They never rush to distribute a new version across their organizations. The same story could have been written about Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, NT, and 95.

    • MacsenMcBain

      I concur. At my last tech position in early 2007, the company (a large NYC-based publishing outfit) was rolling out WinXP after a 4-year testing period. I wouldn’t expect Windows 8 to be adopted by companies with, say, 500+ users for a few more years at the earliest.

  • Mother Hydra

    Unsurprising and not newsworthy. Most companies of size skipped vista and are in the middle of their Win7 support contracts. Ask around in a year or so, lets see how things look then. I agree on the premise- they’ve lost customers they will never get back in the BYOD and portable spaces.

  • Scruff0

    As a developer, 90%+ of our very large clientele base is using XP (in one case, still on SP1) and IE6. They provide us with a large percentage of our yearly earnings, so they very often call the shots when making future decisions on direction.

    Biggest problem is that you have to write software for the lowest common denominator – no .NET, nothing beyond raw Win32, no Metro etc. etc.

    WinXP will be around for a very long time.

  • Sigivald

    I don’t think it’s a matter of trust.

    It’s more that there’s nothing compelling to make them want to upgrade; Win 8 is a lot like Win 7 SP2.

    (Plus, what Shyco Phante said – businesses haven’t ever been driving early adopters, if they could help it, not at the OS level.

    At least not general business, for their mass of computers – those of us in software development adopt the latest toolchain with much greater willingness, but we have radically different incentives than a Corporate IT Department Making Everyone’s Machines Work.)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20500620 Joseph Blake

    Jim, you missed the mark on this one. Most companies don’t run out and install the latest OS. Heck, we aren’t even deploying OS X 10.8 yet unless it’s on a machine that we buy new. It takes a long time to make sure that a new OS doesn’t break your processes, the software you use, or isn’t full of bugs. That applies to Apple (and their terrible enterprise support) as well as Microsoft.

  • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

    I think the question will be more about what a significant number of businesses opt for when buying new hardware to supplement existing installations. I imagine Windows 7 will still be an option.

    Unrelated, what was it people used to say about Star Trek movies? Odd numbers sucked, even numbers were good? Perhaps Windows is filling in the gaps.

  • http://geekfun.com/ Erik S.

    They may have lost the confidence of both business and personal customers, but slow deployments of new MS releases isn’t anything new.

    Microsoft’s problem is even bigger: They’ve been trying for the better part of a decade to make their new releases relevant. It still isn’t working. For the most part, the business customers who make up the lion’s share of their revenue would be perfectly happy sticking with Windows XP and Office 2003. The only reason the upgraded to Windows 7 is that they finally decided to upgrade their decade old hardware, that, and Microsoft was eventually going to stop supporting XP.

    Balmer still has his job because few people thought he could double Microsoft’s revenues, but they have, more or less, doubled. Of course, almost all of that has been coasting on decade-old momentum and milking more money by tweaking licensing terms.

  • TheDuke

    Huh? ”As much shit…” You mean that under-selling OS called XP, or 7? Or how about that awful Vista, which alone outsells every combined version of that success called OS X? How about the Xbox? Hmm, ok, ok, the Xbox isn’t quite the living room killer as the Apple TV (I hear Apple are going to live stream their event today to ATV users. which accounts for all 24 of them.)

  • TheDuke

    Oh, if MS has lost the confidence of its customers, then god knows what that translates to if one looks at the sales numbers of OS X!

  • gjgustav

    With several commenters claiming “we’re still on XP at my company” it’s pretty clear why Apple doesn’t focus on the enterprise. IT departments are focused on two things:

    control: they dictate what hardware/software employees run, and demand companies give them heads up on what’s coming, despite the fact that they sit on it for months and even years. (Does the extra few months really matter. lessening their own workload: they’re lazy. They don’t want to change, despite the world changing around them. How many companies are still using IE6, despite the world settling on web standards? A lot Both of these points come at the expense of employee productivity. IT departments do not let individual employees choose the tools that make them the most productive. They do not buy from companies that don’t “play ball” with their policies (which ultimately are self-serving security theatre)

    It’s no wonder Apple doesn’t cater to enterprise. Apple’s business model has always been to focus on the end user. This clashes with IT departments in enterprise.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20500620 Joseph Blake

      A few things, I work in an “enterprise” IT department (it’s at a university so it’s not exactly the same as working at, say, GE) and I’m an Apple user, but your comments show that you really don’t get business IT. An organization of 20,000 employees or 500,000 employees can’t be run on consumer software and services like a small business. There are regulations, many stakeholders, financial and technical constraints that all play into the decisions that enterprise IT groups make. Sure, being stuck on IE 6 is more or less indefensible now, but it’s likely cheaper to keep going with that than rewrite line of business apps that have the chance of blowing up and shutting down the business. There’s two sides to the story.

      • gjgustav

        ha ha. I used to work in IT myself. And at a university IT department (where I used to work) is unlike enterprise, so you can’t use it as a comparison. IT departments in most universities haven’t been given the control that enterprise has.

        Nobody said anything about “consumer software” at all. I don’t know where you got that. The consumer software mentioned anywhere here is the new Windows 8 UI.

        Cheaper to stick with IE6 proprietary websites? 1. They planned poorly to begin with. Had they programmed to standards in the first place, they could adapt to newer technologies much easier.

        How do you define cheaper? How many IT departments calculate diminished end user productivity of sticking with the old solution, in addition to their own budget to update?