News - Windows Start Menu spotted in alleged leak

[Corky34]

Microsoft might be able to get the small to medium sized businesses to switch to Office 365, but I honestly can't see either the public sector nor large (/enterprise) customers wanting to switch wholesale. First off there's the issue of price - with "conventional" Office being priced so low that Office365 would pretty much have to be free to be a better deal. Secondly, and here Saracen maybe nodding, Office365 is a cloud produce, which is fine and dandy if those cloud servers are exclusively under the customers control, but that's not the way that Office365 is being sold.

Public sector & enterprise won't switch wholesale, but they are going to switch the vast majority. The UK Parliamentary ICT Service is planning the switch after the 2015 elections, saying only a small amount of House data needed a high level of security, going on to say, the assumption for maximum cloud storage was 80 per cent of all data.

In a blog post Microsoft lays claim to Kansas City, MO; the City of Seattle; King County, WA; the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, Dupage County, the University of Miami, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Sacramento (Sacramento State) and California State University, all using 365.

Like i said the more users in an organisation the cheaper it is to use 365, it's one of the biggest selling points for 365, with the handy info-graphic in the above linked blog post showing the city of Chicago saving $1.3 million over the next 4 years, and an %80 decrease in the cost per user. The way Microsoft is pricing 365 at this moment in time reduces TCO substantially, whether that will remain true in the future is not known.

[crossy]

Public sector & enterprise won't switch wholesale, but they are going to switch the vast majority. The UK Parliamentary ICT Service is planning the switch after the 2015 elections, saying only a small amount of House data needed a high level of security, going on to say, the assumption for maximum cloud storage was 80 per cent of all data.
[snipped]

Again an interesting and informative post. Although being pedantic none of the "wins" are exactly big time. There's no BP, HP's or IBM's in the commercial sides and I'd be a lot more impressed if DWP was signed up for UK public sector.

I'm kind of out of my comfort zone here, (but if you want to talk about Oracle on IBM System p then I'm happier), but according to my Wintel colleagues:

The shift in UI - whcih ironically was supposed to make things simpler - actually meant more retrain time for those poor folks coming to it "cold", (as opposed to those who'd got new machines with Win8 at home).

In which case Saracen's opinion that retaining at least some option to switch back to a form of the "old" interface has some merit. Others have also agreed with me that the current MUI also makes them less productive and more reliant on keyboard "tricks" to get on.

[Corky34]

In which case Saracen's opinion that retaining at least some option to switch back to a form of the "old" interface has some merit. Others have also agreed with me that the current MUI also makes them less productive and more reliant on keyboard "tricks" to get on.

Ohh don't get me wrong, i hate the direction Microsoft is / has been heading as much as the next guy.
It's why i said the reason people hate Windows 8.x goes deeper than just the MUI, or any other form of GUI change. Well it does for those people that can see the writing on the wall (imho).
The rest are happy to be lead down the garden path to subscription based operating systems, with its high walls, and a landscape gardener that adds and removes features without a care in the world.

[Saracen]

Ohh don't get me wrong, i hate the direction Microsoft is / has been heading as much as the next guy.
It's why i said the reason people hate Windows 8.x goes deeper than just the MUI, or any other form of GUI change. Well it does for those people that can see the writing on the wall (imho).
The rest are happy to be lead down the garden path to subscription based operating systems, with its high walls, and a landscape gardener that adds and removes features without a care in the world.

Quite.

I see what I THINK is the writing on the wall. I could be wrong, but it looked clear enough for me to at least invest some time in looking at the most obvious alternative .... switch to Linux. And, aside from deciding on the flavour, it proved a lot less effort than I thought. I started out looking for proof of concept, as it were, that it was a practical option. And ended up, in large part, doing it.

For me, it's an eminently viable option. For others, maybe not so much. But it works for me and at a minimum, tells me I can go pretty much entirely non-MS if I'm reading the writing on the wall correctly.