Survey Reveals Companies' Early Windows 8 Reactions and Plans

[btarunr]

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:

• 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.

These results convey a largely balanced set of early opinions regarding the new operating system release from Microsoft, with a fairly sizeable group of enterprises anxious to get started, while others take a "wait and see" position and yet other organizations not even thinking about a move to Windows 8 at the time. With the official launch of Windows 8 last week and its broader availability now on new touch devices and computers, the ability to experience the new OS firsthand is greatly expanded for IT leaders and the employee groups they serve. As early adopters test Windows 8 and share their experiences and corporate employees have the chance to get a feel for the new devices, IT and business leaders will be in a better position to evaluate the system for their businesses. PC Helps will continue to run this Windows 8 Pulse Survey at periodic intervals throughout the coming year.

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[qwerty_lesh]

Longcat approves of this image.

 

[btarunr]

I'm honoured, Longcat.

 

[MAXLD]

That report kinda smells like propaganda... but coming from a company that makes money on people upgrading and needing support for new products, I guess it's not suspicious at all. Pretty sure the "Microsoft Gold Certified Partner" status also has nothing to do with it...

 

[eidairaman1]

Military wont move to it immediately for their basic terminals. I also like to mention they dont say anything about disadvantages which there are plenty already.

 

[qubit]

That report kinda smells like propaganda...

No way! I'll bet it's not Microsoft sponsored either.

 

[hellrazor]

• 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.

Bull fucking shit.

 

[qubit]

Bull fucking shit.

No hellrazor, this PR is impartial.

 

[3870x2]

We are currently on XP and will be moving to windows 8.

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.

 

[Covert_Death]

OMG everyone. start8 or pokki lol

best windows experience ever now

 

[human_error]

The company that sent out the survey supplies office software support, so none of the respondents will be medium to large tech companies (who would use internal support). If you were a non-tech company moving to windows 7 and had never heard about the complaints with windows 8 then of course you'd be interested in moving to it - after all windows 7 is much better than xp and so 8 must be better than 7.

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.

 

[Frick]

Bull fucking shit.

Naah, it all depends on who they asked. Note it said "70% of respondents".

 

[Kreij]

Another survery of 700 IT Executives ...

http://www.businessinsider.com/windows-8-tablet-ipad-business-comparison-2012-11

 

[dude12564]

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.

If they're "in process of moving to Windows 7", I don't think they'll be moving on to Windows 8 for a while.

 

[Completely Bonkers]

These sponsored surveys are not necessary... unless you are trying to prove something. MS is trying to prove something to the World. They are trying to tell us that WE WANT W8. Funny. That's not what I heard the World saying about W8. Is MS trying to speak for us? Is it trying to think for us? Apparently so.

 

[Kreij]

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.

"Hands-on experience" and "little or no exposure" seems to cover the bases.
So what about the other 37%? Did they forget to answer the question?

 

[NC37]

These sponsored surveys are not necessary... unless you are trying to prove something. MS is trying to prove something to the World. They are trying to tell us that WE WANT W8. Funny. That's not what I heard the World saying about W8. Is MS trying to speak for us? Is it trying to think for us? Apparently so.

M$ is and they'll likely fail. M$ just isn't Apple. They do not have total control over the hardware end to force it. Apple on the other hand does. You could buy the best and most awesome Mac now, and within a year Apple could decide not to support it with future OS revisions because of some odd reason. Apple has actually been doing this. They used to say 5 years, but then they broke that.

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

 

[eidairaman1]

M$ is and they'll likely fail. M$ just isn't Apple. They do not have total control over the hardware end to force it. Apple on the other hand does. You could buy the best and most awesome Mac now, and within a year Apple could decide not to support it with future OS revisions because of some odd reason. Apple has actually been doing this. They used to say 5 years, but then they broke that.

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

Cost of upgrades plus down time means business is crippled considerably. Businesses upgrade normally in 5-10 years at a time

 

[lauri_hoefs]

The company that sent out the survey supplies office software support, so none of the respondents will be medium to large tech companies (who would use internal support). If you were a non-tech company moving to windows 7 and had never heard about the complaints with windows 8 then of course you'd be interested in moving to it - after all windows 7 is much better than xp and so 8 must be better than 7.

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.

Yes, but it's not only tech companies that use computers. A huge portion of companies that rely on computers are not tech related in their core businesses. And many of them don't have in-house support and IT administration, they have outsourced them.

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.