Fighting back

Adoption issues

Perhaps typical of many end users, Newcastle University will skip from Windows 7 to Windows 10, says desktop technologies team leader Mark Jefferys.

“We’ll treat Windows 8 like a Vista,” says Jefferys who is responsible for 9,000 desktops over 10 sites, 90 percent of them Windows. “The [Windows 8] user interface will scare the natives; there will be adoption issues. It’s good for tablets that are touch-enabled but it’s not intuitive for PC users.

“We’ll skip straight to Windows 10 and have some teaching areas seeded next year. It depends on how it hits the market – there’s the adage about waiting for first service pack.” He says that deploying a new OS is a “significant investment in scale and rework”. Not so much for student labs – “those machines have no data on them so we can roll them out at a rate of knots” – but for academics who receive a “valet-style” service.

Jefferys says upgrades in the academic staff environment require special care – “we potentially have the cure for cancer”. Staff also need high-touch services “so they don’t break stride”. He hints at growing opportunities here for IT service providers.

“As people become less computer literate [on upgrading PCs], that becomes a real pressure. Researchers and academics are asked to do more, so then they’re more time-poor,” Jefferys says.

“We’re thinly resourced for what we need to do. We’d like a partner to do PC commissions and decommissions so we can add higher-end value. We can [ask], ‘What are you researching in terms of teaching; from a technology point of view, what could help you to do it better?’ ”

Newcastle University supplies Dell PCs to staff and students, and an increasing ratio of Apple Macs. And while there are some old XP machines still on campus, these are being weeded out. The big growth is in all-in-one PCs and iMacs, Jefferys says, because they’re easier to deploy and popular with users. And although he’s unsure of the academic benefit of touch-enabled all-in-one PCs, these went into labs in a ‘wait-and-see’ approach.

Bryan Ma, IDC’s Singapore-based vice president of client devices research, tells CRN that while he’s not predicting some huge PC sales spike driven by Windows 10, the combination of the new OS and hybrid devices should be a winning formula. 

“The value proposition for Windows 10 is going to be more obvious with 2-in-1 devices rather than just your everyday clamshell notebooks, so if anything, it will likely help that segment more. But, of course, 2-in-1 devices are coming from a smaller base.”

Ma tells CRN that the new operating system is an improvement, but despite expecting a little bump around the launch at the end of 2015 as the Microsoft marketing engine kicks in, he isn’t forecasting a huge sales spike. 

“Windows 10 is definitely where Microsoft should have been with Windows 8, but even then, we aren’t necessarily expecting it to translate into huge PC upgrades right away.”

“Consumers will get free in-place upgrades using existing hardware, while businesses are likely to cling to Windows 7 for as long as they can, rather than making any massive shifts to Windows 10. In that sense, upgrade cycles should generally just proceed as usual,” says Ma.

Next: in good form and PC sales forecasts