Businesses Switching to Windows 8

By admin on Thursday, November 3, 2011 - 09:05

Are Businesses Switching To Windows 8 or Windows 7?

A survey carried out by Information Week found that 5% of the 973 IT professionals it polled are suggesting that their clients upgrade to Windows 8 as soon as it is launched. This might not seem much, but for Microsoft, 5% of businesses coming on board immediately is a very good sign.



Some 53% of the IT professionals polled said they would switch to Windows 8, 13% sometime in the first year and 19% within the first two years of the new OS being launched, with the remaining 16% moving over to Windows 8 sometime after that.

Will Windows 8 Overtake Windows XP?

Microsoft will be relieved that the new OS is already raising such interest amongst IT professionals, especially as Windows 7 didn't make that much an impact on the business market. Instead Windows XP is the most popular OS used by businesses, with over half of all businesses still using this OS. In fact, the main reason given by many IT professionals for the switch to Windows 8 was the fact that support for XP will run down in the next three years.

As Rich Reynolds of Microsoft blogged "Ten years ago, Windows XP was a big step forward – working on the PC got easier, faster and more fun. Windows XP offered a new user interface that helped people more easily find what they needed. One of the most notable advances was it democratized digital photography. Windows XP made it easy to get images from digital cameras, manage and print pictures from your PC, with broad support for a range of cameras and photo printers. Wireless also became the given with built-in support; plug and play became the standard. It was a great OS for its time."

But Microsoft Urges Companies to Move to Windows 7 Now

However, despite the fact that some companies are already considering the move to Windows 8, Microsoft thinks they should upgrade to Windows 7 instead. Reynolds continued: "Many of you have many of your PCs still running Windows XP and Office 2003. Moving to Windows 7 and Office 2010 today enables you to embrace the way we work today versus the way we worked 10 years ago.

"Furthermore, Windows XP and Office 2003 will no longer be supported after April, 2014 which leaves little time for you to upgrade your PC fleet when accounting for the time it takes to prepare for the migration and complete the deployment."

In fact, Microsoft echoes the advice given by Gartner Inc on September 19, 2011 which was: "Organizations running Windows XP and working on Windows 7 migrations: Continue as planned; do not switch to Windows 8."

So which way will businesses jump? We'll have to wait and see. But our money is on Windows 8, if only for the fact that the OS is so much more flexible than Windows 7 and can run on such a wide variety of devices.