Good points all,
I like the points about the hidden powers of win8.x, quite frankly our 2000+ pc's organization couldn't care less. But the point was well presented that there are improvements here and there, but I believe most companies dont need that power on their boxes, otherwise would not use 3y leasing cycles.
However, given that, we have loads of win X requiring apps, which run seemingly ok on win7, but with the personnel we have being what they are, the decision was made to skip win8 due to the training requirements. We run near 100ish offices and maybe a dozen sales points (just necessary due to company structure), and most personnel don't give a flying F about their computers as email, document management etc and then a few tools are all that is needed to do the work.
This given, we ARE I believe finally at a point when linux on the desktop should be seriously considered. We run office2007 due to the fact we don't like cloud for security and governance reasons, and newer office versions have F* all to offer above 2007. So given the upgrade path with training to win9 + latest office versions + upgrading all our infrastructure maybe a 50ish servers with crap win2003r2 software that wont run on newer, I believe the time has come to look at alternatives. Just 1500 or so office licenses to latest with SA has a certain cost to it.
There has never been, nor does there now exist, to the best of my knowledge, a good, working, cheap migration path for applications from Win (anything say XP) to Win (anything say 8 or 9), nor on the server side.
This just forces into a constant upgrade path, which is utterly pointless unless you actually want something new but the area we are in does not require anything new for most operational needs.
So a service based environment with linux boxes would probably be quite cost efficient as compared to the client and server side winNt versions 9 - 12 cycle say of 5 years.
So a very good series of Commentards, and quite interesting from the CIO office point of view. Truly MS may very well be losing it's relevance as a tech company.