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In times of hardship or recession, no company wants to spend money. They would rather save costs of operating. Most South African corporates have grudgingly accepted Windows 7. Especially those that have head offices overseas in Europe or the U.S.
No users or owners of Personal Computers right now wants to spend hard earned cash on a new operating system. So most of my time recently has been taken up with repairing or refurbishing systems.
So it was a little surprising to read this:-
Five Reasons why Windows 8 will be dead on arrival
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/five-reasons-why-windows-8-will-be-dead-on-arrival/10275?tag=nl.e539
Just the fact that Microsoft want to unleash a new and improved(?) operating system and a new and untried user interface in this time of recession made me pause to think. Are they mad? Or is this a ploy to get the persistent users off Windows XP? “Revenue Stream” is possibly the answer. The present one is ‘drying up’.
Recent events
Several of my clients have managed to ‘trash’ Windows 7 and Vista boot areas on their hard disk. The operating system DVD could not ‘rescue’ or restore the machine to its former working state. SysRescueCD and TestDisk could restore the partition table after a lengthy scan of the hard disk. So I still recommend that “Power Users” invest in a copy of “System RescueCD”. You can get it here:
I see South African users clinging desperately to Windows XP until long after 2015. The moderate cost hardware of today will just about run Windows 7 but will run Windows XP very nicely.
The recent interface UI debacle with Ubuntu ‘unity’ shows that users are not happy with radical changes to the system. Also most Vista and Windows 7 systems were changed to ‘classic windows’ themes after just a few minutes at the client’s request.
I wouldn’t suggest that Microsoft go back to the “Program Manager” desktop. But maybe an alternative could be ‘slotted’ into the system. So experienced users could go back to using familiar menus and icons. Rather than trying to ‘finger poke’ the screen to get it to work.
Windows XP still supports the original IBM/Microsoft keyboard standard for using the ‘Alt’ key and a highlighted letter to ‘jump’ into action whatever window has the ‘focus’. Windows 7 has steered away from using anything but the keyboard. Windows 8 might let you lick the screen but I doubt it.