Windows 8 in the Enterprise: Why IT pros say no

We surveyed 50 tech pros via Google plus, as well as 15 tech pros from large enterprises at the geek site I run about whether they were gearing up for a Windows 8 switch.

Out of 50 tech pros I interviewed at enterprises around the world, 41 said they had no plans to bring in Windows 8 because of learning curve issues. Many are racing to upgrade XP systems to Windows 7 now and Windows 7 sales are as brisk, or brisker, than ever - the opposite of what typically happens before a major OS release comes out.

Source

A Guy

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

I know what Microsoft called it, BUT for myself XP stands for eXpressly Prohibited. True I still use it as a test bed, but really no choice in the matter, it is still widely adopted thru-out the USA.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Scareware/Marketing Scam

EDIT: Doing beta testing now with Bull Guard software. This is totally really funny. I have one Win XP test machine. (We both know Microsoft brought it to the end of it's life, and did everything THEY will with it.) Ran the software's tune up function (Clean install before I loaded the Bull Guard onto it.) and it FOUND 339 problems with WinXP, and was only able to correct less than half of them. (136 fixed) Remembering now, this unit has EVERYTHING Microsoft made available for it, and STILL Bull Guard found that many problems with it. I actually fell off my chair laughing.

These so called problems are imaginary (like the menu open time is set to 200ms, when they say it should be less).

It's a standard Windows cleaner "up sell" tactic.
IoBit ASC says this all of the time.

Strangley enough, my Windows installs "don't miss a beat".

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

OK, I can go for that. BUT explain the faster boot, and response time this PC gets now.

 

[lehnerus2000]

I have my suspicions

OK, I can go for that. BUT explain the faster boot, and response time this PC gets now.

I should have said "A lot of these so called problems are imaginary ...".

A lot of people say that cleaning/defragging the Registry has no effect.

I suspect that it may be possible to boost performance, by removing calls to non-existent hardware/software (for example).
The computer doesn't have to wait for the time-outs before it continues.

If you look at their suggestions, you will often see that they reduce a lot of the wait times for actions. (e.g. menu open delays).
Some of the original delay settings are quite large.

I guess those wait times were because hardware wasn't as good in the "old days".
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they do the same thing to driver/OS component load settings.

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

OK, just finished doing the same on a Medion (brand name- generic) desktop Windows XP, and this time it was in the thousands (4327 problems reported by Bull Guard) Weird tho, it corrected them ALL. That to me is surprising. The PC in question is used mainly by teenagers, and a lot of those problems were Trojans, and viruses. (Gotta LOVE this one: peekapoo.tro) I have no clue as to what it does while the mice (teens) are away, but some of the names they give them are super funny.

 

[jimbo45]

I know what Microsoft called it, BUT for myself XP stands for eXpressly Prohibited. True I still use it as a test bed, but really no choice in the matter, it is still widely adopted thru-out the USA.

Hi there
we used to call Windows XP -- Windows eXPensive - especially when they first started that activation stuff.

Windows NT was known as Windows NeanderThal or Windows NoThanks. Still probably the WORST EVER version of windows to try and use in a non server situation -- total disaster zone.

We used to call IBM as well back in mainframe days - It's Being Mended.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

:thumb: Jimbo LoL I love it.

 

[lehnerus2000]

OK, just finished doing the same on a Medion (brand name- generic) desktop Windows XP, and this time it was in the thousands (4327 problems reported by Bull Guard) Weird tho, it corrected them ALL. That to me is surprising. The PC in question is used mainly by teenagers, and a lot of those problems were Trojans, and viruses. (Gotta LOVE this one: peekapoo.tro) I have no clue as to what it does while the mice (teens) are away, but some of the names they give them are super funny.

A computer's performance improving after malware is removed, doesn't surprise me.
It will probably reduce the boot time too.

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

You're right, it did speed up boot time too.

 

[Stratos]

To share our internal testing (small)...

We just completed testing W8 CP and we specifically looked at efficiency, work done versus time spent. After 3 solid months of testing with 27 client computers, this is what we found using desktop computers. The machines used hardware based on mid 2011 spec'd items.

> Factoring in having to get used to Windows 8, average weekly productivity was approximately 33% worse than with Windows 7.

> Without factoring in the learning curve and strictly looking at the highest levels of Win8 productivity during the testing period, it was found to be 18-20% less productive than when clients were using Win7.

The key complaints we found during our survey are the confusing locations to alter settings. Instead of having just one location in the Control Panel, they now had to look at more than one place . The lack of a Start/Win button was huge, nearly everyone was greatly affected the first day due to that change alone and severely impaired the user's ability to easily navigate around, trying to find out where to shutdown or restart the computer. We had people getting stuck prior to the login screen (lock screen), something we never ran into before with any previous versions of Windows.

Metro was a hit and miss, many found it cool looking but found it less than useful on a desktop computer.

Nearly all didn't like the overly plain look of many of the apps, they found the large, thin fonts very unappealing.

Our internal survey showed 26 of 27 users found nothing beneficial about Win8 where it was clearly better than using Win7.

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

Stratos said:

The key complaints we found during our survey are the confusing locations to alter settings. Instead of having just one location in the Control Panel.

As I had shown in another thread, YOU can easily get to those settings. and not even need to look thru the Metro Start to do it. Simply move your mouse cursor to the lower far left, and then press the right mouse button. I'm more than sure if your test group had that information during the testing period that test group would of found everything they needed in the Guts Menu easily.

 

[Stratos]

Stratos said:

The key complaints we found during our survey are the confusing locations to alter settings. Instead of having just one location in the Control Panel.

As I had shown in another thread, YOU can easily get to those settings. and not even need to look thru the Metro Start to do it. Simply move your mouse cursor to the lower far left, and then press the right mouse button. I'm more than sure if your test group had that information during the testing period that test group would of found everything they needed in the Guts Menu easily.

It doesn't matter if "I" know where it is, I'm the IT person supporting the users however remove me from the picture and you're left with users trying to figure things out on their own and we've proven sufficiently that without prior knowledge, it's not as easy to figure out even if they're experienced Win7 users. We carefully selected our test users to ensure they had zero prior experience with Win8 to get honest results.

Any new OS could be made easier to deal with if an IT support tech is standing by ready to help them get used to the new interface, but that's hardly realistic as it's often that, in the enterprise scene that you'll only have a very small amount of help desk personnel supporting hundreds of users. If you're the only "computer guy" in a company of only 12 computer users I'd agree with you, however such is not the case.

 

[Stratos]

This is just my personal take on things but when we make changes to work tools (I consider an OS such), I always look at making things simpler so that people can do more. That's as crude and simple as I can make it regarding efficiency.

Win8 is made for 2 generally broad markets, tablets and traditional computers with/without touch interfaces. MS knows users are already used to XP/Vista/Win7's interface. The changes they made will greatly alter some of the basic things people do every day, not changes in some advanced administration feature most users will never see or are concerned about.

I ask myself did MS have to make those changes and does it really benefit the users to make those changes, or did MS simply change things around just for the sake of doing something different. I honestly don't believe in changing (or fixing) something that's not broke. I've heard just about every complaint or issue about Windows and none of them were about how they had problems with the Start/Win button or being confused as to finding the Control Panel.

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

Stratos, I don't know if you were around the industry during the roll out of Windows 95, BUT your complaints mirror them almost exactly. (New Windows 95 User: What is this menu thing? All my programs are messed up, and why is there this control panels thing? It is making using my computer harder. I like the way it was in Win 3.1, just put my disc in, and it did EVERYTHING for me. I never had to login with Windows 3.1, this is stupid why they have to change things for? Windows 3.1 did EVERYTHING I wanted it too). You can find this in the TechNet's common complaints at Microsoft, the only thing I changed what removing that person's name, and email address.

 

[Stratos]

Stratos, I don't know if you were around the industry during the roll out of Windows 95, BUT your complaints mirror them almost exactly. (New Windows 95 User: What is this menu thing? All my programs are messed up, and why is there this control panels thing? It is making using my computer harder. I like the way it was in Win 3.1, just put my disc in, and it did EVERYTHING for me. I never had to login with Windows 3.1, this is stupid why they have to change things for? Windows 3.1 did EVERYTHING I wanted it too). You can find this in the TechNet's common complaints at Microsoft, the only thing I changed what removing that person's name, and email address.

I was working as a professional when FORTRAN, COBOL, AS400 and Novell Netware was commonplace in a business environment. Win95 wasn't that common where I worked at, it was mostly touted as a home user's OS. It was a time where many businesses were kind of split with what they chose to use, many city/state offices used a combination of Unix and DOS shell "green screen" interfaces, some stayed with Win 3.11 for Workgroups for a long time. A select few did use Win95 but as I recall the majority of issues I most often heard about was...

- AOL (called AO-HELL by some users) dialup services
- PnP (called plug and pray) due to how IRQ and resource conflicts were common
- real viruses

 

[Mike Lonewolf]

LMAO ^5 Stratos, BUT you left out the RS600 in that grouping, and NOT all of us went the drone way with AOL, I happened to been a member of Ci$ back in those days, as well as IRC. Also most of the script kiddies (AOL) were the ones that were infecting the net with those viruses. Talk about a pain in the posterior.

Gotta love all these Linux users there are today, BUT I wonder how they would fare with the AS400 & RS600's IBM AIX UNIX operating system? There was no lovely KDE desktop environment back then, we had to work directly from inside the shell.

 

[Coke Robot]

To share our internal testing (small)...

We just completed testing W8 CP and we specifically looked at efficiency, work done versus time spent. After 3 solid months of testing with 27 client computers, this is what we found using desktop computers. The machines used hardware based on mid 2011 spec'd items.

> Factoring in having to get used to Windows 8, average weekly productivity was approximately 33% worse than with Windows 7.

> Without factoring in the learning curve and strictly looking at the highest levels of Win8 productivity during the testing period, it was found to be 18-20% less productive than when clients were using Win7.

The key complaints we found during our survey are the confusing locations to alter settings. Instead of having just one location in the Control Panel, they now had to look at more than one place . The lack of a Start/Win button was huge, nearly everyone was greatly affected the first day due to that change alone and severely impaired the user's ability to easily navigate around, trying to find out where to shutdown or restart the computer. We had people getting stuck prior to the login screen (lock screen), something we never ran into before with any previous versions of Windows.

Metro was a hit and miss, many found it cool looking but found it less than useful on a desktop computer.

Nearly all didn't like the overly plain look of many of the apps, they found the large, thin fonts very unappealing.

Our internal survey showed 26 of 27 users found nothing beneficial about Win8 where it was clearly better than using Win7.

I'm kind of curious. How was the training done for Windows 8 usage? Was it a big initial training day, or daily test or a weekly or monthly testing or training? Also, was the system set up in its defaults? No changes to the UI?

 

[Stratos]

We deployed Win8 within our closed group to see how the users would react without any IT support for several weeks. We wanted to measure how people would be able to deal with the lack of (or complete absence of) support and how long it'd take before users were back up and running their systems in the manner for which they need to do their normal daily work. We let them have three weeks to get used to the system before we implemented any training. However nearly all of them couldn't even get past the lock screen to the login screen on the first day.

After the 3 week period, we provided a 2 hour training to get them familiar with only the basics. As dumb as it sounds it did cover matters like how to log in and out of the system, changing the wallpaper, retrieving their work calendars, populating their email boxes and accessing files and applications.

We let the remaining period continue except we continued to measure the amount of work done based on their current Win7 performance numbers for all other projects then measured the difference in times. Even after being satisfactorily comfortable with Win8, the users still took around 18-20% longer to do the same work they do on their regular Win7 machines.

The systems were using mostly default parameters with each machine being managed by a server for accounts and email. As long as the user provided a valid user name/password, the server would create/populate their email automatically without any user interaction on any of the machines. The web browser home page was set to the company's internal site and all necessary corporate links already provided in their favorites and all work applications were already preloaded to include all necessary utilities like PDF readers and such.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

Actually if the work VPN / Login is decently organised you'd never NEED the Windows 8 interface even if the PC was running W8 ! -- your login would present you with the standard WORK / Corporate desktop plus applications that you could use just like you've ALWAYS used it -- the front end OS wouldn't matter a hoot if the PC was set up properly as it would go straight to the login screen of your work server.

If your users were taking longer to do their work then I suggest you fire your I.T dept and get some new people as your Work set up was obviously not ideal -- on a Work PC the user really shouldn't need to run any local apps at all.

You should be able to run the VPN login from ANY OS --doesn't matter what it is -- then you get shown the "Normal Work " screen whether it's Windows 7 or even XP - depending on what the server is running and the users can work just like they've always done.

If your work LAN is OK which most are these days then the speed would be almost as good as running the applications natively.

The VPN approach also has other advantages such as being accessible from anywhere on pretty well any device you care for it to be available to and is easily managed too. You don't have to maintain 100's or even 1000's of client PC's either. Seems a No brainer to work this way rather than take the traditional "End Client" approach with all the extra maintenance that involves.

Another benefit of this approach is that you can get people to use their OWN machines -- this would save the company all the overhead cost of buying PC's etc etc -- the only downside is that security issues would have to be addressed -- but cost and maintainability would be so beneficial I can't see anything against this other than some traditional I.T depts. who would play a much much smaller (albeit still important) role in the enterprise.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Coke Robot]

We deployed Win8 within our closed group to see how the users would react without any IT support for several weeks. We wanted to measure how people would be able to deal with the lack of (or complete absence of) support and how long it'd take before users were back up and running their systems in the manner for which they need to do their normal daily work. We let them have three weeks to get used to the system before we implemented any training. However nearly all of them couldn't even get past the lock screen to the login screen on the first day.

After the 3 week period, we provided a 2 hour training to get them familiar with only the basics. As dumb as it sounds it did cover matters like how to log in and out of the system, changing the wallpaper, retrieving their work calendars, populating their email boxes and accessing files and applications.

We let the remaining period continue except we continued to measure the amount of work done based on their current Win7 performance numbers for all other projects then measured the difference in times. Even after being satisfactorily comfortable with Win8, the users still took around 18-20% longer to do the same work they do on their regular Win7 machines.

The systems were using mostly default parameters with each machine being managed by a server for accounts and email. As long as the user provided a valid user name/password, the server would create/populate their email automatically without any user interaction on any of the machines. The web browser home page was set to the company's internal site and all necessary corporate links already provided in their favorites and all work applications were already preloaded to include all necessary utilities like PDF readers and such.

Huh, interesting. Sounds like a good experiment, but personally, that shouldn't be the way to deploy a new OS. I would had spent a few hours covering the main basics one would need to know, and let people have at it, then monitor and see what difficulties people are having and address them; kind of like being in a classroom!

Also, from your Windows 7 usage data, did those people need to access like, their Documents Library or Computer?