That’s extremely variable. Some businesses are so locked in to XP/IE6 that they never intend to leave until the bitter end. In China, “7″ has only a good nibble so far. That’s supposedly because M$ and the government of China disrupted the illegal-copies-trade so the universe of illegal copies is XP. Talk about unintended consequences… There are tons of XP CDs out there and they are digital. It’s also true that a lot of Chinese and Indian geeks can and do install GNU/Linux far and wide. Then there’s Dell and its retail stores pushing Ubuntu GNU/Linux… It all takes a bit of M$’s share.

MS 8 You!

Staging events to make it appear that people want Windows? Nooooo…

I find it amusing that they are staging contests to get people to stand in line!

(Almost as bad as the Windows Release House Parties!)

With all the kids using Windows 8 on youtube, you can see how dumbed down the GUI truly has become!

Windows 8 is, frankly, more of a consumer platform than it is a business platform, so it’s not something that makes any sense from a business perspective at this juncture. There is really no additional business functionality that Windows 8 gives you.

Many businesses are still running versions of Windows — including Windows XP — where support is being withdrawn, and updates are a costly process.

Gartner even predicts, “We believe 90 percent of large organizations will not deploy Windows 8, and at its peak”, in short it will flop. Windows RT is going to crash and burn. People are going to buy it with the assumption that it will work with legacy software and hardware. It won’t, they’ll return it end of story. MS has really hit a wall in what they can do because they always try to please everyone with legacy compatibility. Now something like RT comes along which completely breaks everything and everyone will flood the forums with endless questions.

The one thing to keep in mind, the only Windows tablets that run legacy software are the actual Windows 8 tablets, and they will be up around $1000. The Windows RT tablets which will be a lot cheaper will NOT run legacy apps, and only will run apps specifically written for Windows RT, of which there is a 2-4 thousand apps currently. Android on the other hand has 600,000 apps.

Which would you prefer??

“Unlike you pogson I can am not politically wed to any particular technology.”

So what does that make you, the last word on unbiased opinion? With “ze_jerkface” as a nym and coming from a Linux haters Web site, you have lost all pretense of being unbiased.

Why do you even pretend to be unbiased?

Let me save you just a little bit of time and energy troll. Don’t even try that stupid “I am unbiased crap”, it doesn’t go down. You are what you what you post, not what you say you are and you post anti-FLOSS. To declare yourself pure and bereft of any personal impurities of bias towards one platform or another is to declare yourself a troll. It’s standard practice for trolls. Nice work troll.

That’s a recent phenomenon (Xbox 360). It took years to break even. Only 24 million (Xbox) were sold over 4.5 years. At one point they were bursting into flames. I gave a lesson on that in one community as they all lived in brittle wooden shacks. PlayStation 2 sold 100 million in a similar time-frame.

If M$ takes five years to make “8″ successful on ARM the whole world will likely have an Android/Linux smart thingy tablet and phone and PC at the rate things are going.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36011/Microsofts_Xbox_360_Division_Sees_132_Billion_Profit_For_Fiscal_Year_2011.php#.UIjV9MXoR0g

Unlike you pogson I can am not politically wed to any particular technology. I think the whole Windows 8 plan is idiotic but I also think that Linux on the desktop would be even worse for consumers.

Why are you still so focused on Microsoft? Have you ever heard of company called Apple? The tablet market is mostly an iPad market and here you are ranting about Microsoft’s lame duck tablet plan and how the united forces of foss will destroy it. You’re locked in some M$ galactic confederacy vs the FOSS rebels fantasy.