Thursday, November 1st 2012
Survey Reveals Companies' Early Windows 8 Reactions and Plans
PC Helps, the premier provider of 24/7, expert, on-demand support for core office software applications and mobile devices used every day by corporate employees, recently completed the first in a series of Windows 8 Pulse Surveys designed to gauge reactions and plans to migrate to Windows 8 - information which the company needs to estimate demand for its services and to plan resourcing and hiring. More than 500 IT leaders and managers from US-based companies with 500 employees or more, across a range of industries, responded to the survey and a majority of the respondents (70%) were from companies with 2,500 or more employees.
Key findings from the survey:
PC Helps, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has already begun to support enterprise early adopters of Windows 8. Over the course of 20 years in business, PC Helps has supported thousands of Microsoft migrations across companies large and small. In addition to its support for Windows 8, PC Helps is currently supporting enterprise migrations to Windows 7 and Office 2010, and also providing ongoing day-to-day support for all prior versions of Microsoft applications, as well as over 200 other core office applications across all types of computers and devices on the market.
- 70% of respondents indicated their organizations are already fully on, or in process of moving to Windows 7, suggesting that their organizational environments are or will soon be ready to make the next move - to Windows 8.
- At the time of the survey, only 38% of the respondents had hands-on experience with Windows 8, while 25% said they had had little to no exposure to it.
- When asked for their initial reactions to Windows 8 as a platform for their organization and end-users, close to 45% of respondents said they had not seen enough of Windows 8 to form an opinion. Among the remaining 55%, a majority indicated that their initial reactions to Windows 8 were generally positive.
- Further, 25% indicated that their organizations were already anticipating a migration to Windows 8, with 17% of all respondents (and 30% of CIOs) expecting to start their migrations as soon as the product was generally available this fall. A full 40% expected their migrations to start by mid-year 2013.
- 54% believe that Windows 8 will be a greater challenge for end-users than previous OS upgrades, presumably because they have seen or heard that the user-interface is very different from Windows 7 and prior versions, implying that there will be a need to support the organization's employees as they move from Windows 7 to Windows 8. But again, opinions were generally positive about Windows 8 as a platform for their businesses.
PC Helps, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has already begun to support enterprise early adopters of Windows 8. Over the course of 20 years in business, PC Helps has supported thousands of Microsoft migrations across companies large and small. In addition to its support for Windows 8, PC Helps is currently supporting enterprise migrations to Windows 7 and Office 2010, and also providing ongoing day-to-day support for all prior versions of Microsoft applications, as well as over 200 other core office applications across all types of computers and devices on the market.
18 Comments on Survey Reveals Companies' Early Windows 8 Reactions and Plans
We are not happy with it as an operating system, but it provides more longevity than windows 7. When you upgrade as a company, you should always go to the latest stable release version.
best windows experience ever now
None of the people I work with (in an IT services company) have any interest or want to move to windows 8 - this is in a stark contrast to the vast majority wanting to move to 7 from xp. Of course this is a small sample of the people in the same company as me, but it does show a big difference in demand between 7 and 8.
www.businessinsider.com/windows-8-tablet-ipad-business-comparison-2012-11
So what about the other 37%? Did they forget to answer the question?
When it was tech like Core Image, they kinda had to force people to change. But they've been releasing and discontinuing Macs that should have no problem running the newer OSX builds aside from maybe RAM amounts. As Macs become more and more appliances, we'll see Apple doing it quicker.
If M$ tries to do this, gonna make a lot of folks angry. Lot of businesses do not like updating hardware all the time. Worked at a water park and it took them a decade to finally update hardware. When they did, they still took the lowest of the low end parts. Sat one day for an hour trying to print something out from a flash drive. That was with a C2D machine too. Poor thing was completely overloaded with work it was handling in the background. Where they needed an i7, they installed a C2D.../facepalm
Of course if they have just finished migrating to Windows 7, it makes little sense to move to 8. But there is still a huge crowd of XP/Vista users, and to them migrating to the latest version is a better option. They are going to have to migrate before the XP support ends. If they can choose between 7 and 8, why would they choose the one that has shorter support span left?
But the 70% figure still sounds a bit high, as I really find it suspect that so many of the respondents would already have planned and started the migration. I've never seen it happen this quickly with any previous version.