Time to rethink
"There is a very real danger to Microsoft that more companies standardise on the desktop-oriented Windows 7 to avoid Windows 8 – and in so doing avoid Windows Next and Windows After That, too."
I don't get how MS will avoid this. I work for a Fortune 150 with 50,000+ employees, and the org is still moving from XP to Windows 7, and has been for 3+ years. The complete rollout of Windows 7 will probably end sometime next year.
Does MS expect IT to instantly start moving people from 7 to 8(or 9 or whatever)? There's no way that that's going to happen. Windows 7 is going to be around till 2020 at the very least, probably longer.
The simple truth is that Operating Systems are no longer the sexy things they were in the 90s and early 00s. The vast majority of what people do needs nothing more than Windows 7 (and frankly, XP worked just as well for a lot of people). The new shiny stuff is great for sysadmins and IT, but the end user, perhaps not as much. Good enough is good enough - just like with CPU power, where a CPU from 2009-ish is vastly overpowered for MS Office (unless you're a real Excel guru, in which case you know when to upgrade).
The future is really in integration and OS-agnostic management.
Simply upgrading the box on the desk is not enough - MS has to sell a credible vision of mobile + tablet + secure remote access, along with easy management - and I think it needs to start managing OS X machines as well.
The likes of Casper are used in my org today, and it's messy. Apple doesn't seem to want to do stuff with the enterprise, so if MS got some smart people to create a tool (or plug-in) that lets you manage OS X machines, and iOS, that would be $$$ in the bank.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
