You don't seem to understand large enterprise. I'm using a 6 year old desktop, 7 year old Office and I just recently upgraded to W7 earlier this year. Only because Xp support ended. I won't go on about all the other software I use which is also years old. I can pretty much guarantee that other large corporations are similar. I worked for a few. They do the minimum because it's a disruption for their business to upgrade. It's costs a lot of money. Something you don't quite understand.
Continuum for my company would be pointless at this stage. I don't see large scale adoption for years if at all in large enterprise..
Well said sir, I couldn't agree more. Enterprise, large and small, works very different than the rest of the world. Especially when compared to consumer markets. Yet your average consumer doesn't understand this and will happily extrapolate their own experience and assume that everyone must obviously be in the same boat, want the same things, have the same needs and requirements, etc. While it costs next to nothing to update ones personal computer from Windows 7 to Windows 10 it's quite different for corporations. I'll take your Windows 7 upgrade example because I happen to work in IT and know the headaches the upgrade from XP to 7 caused. What most people don't understand is how much work an upgrade like this results in. First, you have to determine which computers will even work with the new operating system and take into account how many new computers will have to be purchased. Second, each system needs to get inspected thoroughly for software and each application has to be verified to support the new OS. Many applications will have to be updated as well, in some cases inducing additional licensing and therefore additional costs. In many other cases the software used on the old system is not even supported anymore and needs to be repurchased, which won't cost a few bucks spent on the app store, $100, or $500 but in most cases thousands of dollars. After all it's enterprise software, and enterprise software is very expensive. Third, the entire infrastructure has to be replaced beforehand, which means servers (in order to fully support all Windows 10 features necessary one needs a Windows Server 2016 operating system, which happens not to be even available yet), which in turn means back to step one for each server. Once all this preparation is finished one has to design the rollout for not only dozens but in many cases hundreds or thousands of systems and run test after test after test, because on D-Day everyhing has to run smooth as silk. Which is obvios because the update has to be as non-disruptive as humanly possible since people need to get their job done. Updating 100 laptops from Windows 7 to Windows 10 has, at this point already caused a massive five- to six-figure dent in the budget, and I haven't even talked about end user training or the necessity for additional IT support resources for all the small and big ailments that magically appear after every major update. Because for us in IT it's humanly impossible to test every single scenario, every single use case, and every single way in which our customers (aka the users) will use their systems in a very very wrong way (
Programming is a race between software engineers who strive to produce *****-proof programs and the universe which strives to produce bigger idiots. So far the universe is winning.)
Long story short: a major OS update, be that XP -> 7 or 7 -> 10 is a massive project for corporations. Consumers don't understand that because for them, updating two or four or even ten systems for themselves, their friends, family, etc. is a no-brainer. If it doesn't work no big loss. If, on the other hand, a corporation proceeds with rolling out a system that doesn't fully work all hell would break loose and there would be serious monetary consequences.
It's not that corporations are slow, conservative, or unwilling to upgrade. We've had the first few IT laptops running Windows 10 as early as September 2015 and held our kick-off meeting for our Windows 10 laptop upgrade project last week. But from my experience it will take at least six months before we even roll out the first wave of updates and at least two full years until we've updated every single laptop, at which point we won't have even touched the desktops or terminal servers yet.