Early Windows 8 reactions and plans

PC Helps completed a Windows 8 survey designed to gauge reactions and plans to migrate to Windows 8.

More than 500 IT leaders and managers from US-based companies with 500 employees or more, across a range of industries, responded to the survey and a majority of the respondents (70%) were from companies with 2,500 or more employees.

Key findings:

• 70% of respondents indicated their organizations are already fully on, or in process of moving to Windows 7, suggesting that their organizational environments are or will soon be ready to make the next move – to Windows 8.
• At the time of the survey, only 38% of the respondents had hands-on experience with Windows 8, while 25% said they had had little to no exposure to it.
• When asked for their initial reactions to Windows 8 as a platform for their organization and end-users, close to 45% of respondents said they had not seen enough of Windows 8 to form an opinion. Among the remaining 55%, a majority indicated that their initial reactions to Windows 8 were generally positive.
• Further, 25% indicated that their organizations were already anticipating a migration to Windows 8, with 17% of all respondents (and 30% of CIOs) expecting to start their migrations as soon as the product was generally available this fall. A full 40% expected their migrations to start by mid-year 2013.
• 54% believe that Windows 8 will be a greater challenge for end-users than previous OS upgrades, presumably because they have seen or heard that the user-interface is very different from Windows 7 and prior versions, implying that there will be a need to support the organization’s employees as they move from Windows 7 to Windows 8. But again, opinions were generally positive about Windows 8 as a platform for their businesses.

These results convey a largely balanced set of early opinions regarding the new operating system release from Microsoft, with a fairly sizeable group of enterprises anxious to get started, while others take a “wait and see” position and yet other organizations not even thinking about a move to Windows 8 at the time.

With the official launch of Windows 8 last week and its broader availability now on new touch devices and computers, the ability to experience the new OS firsthand is greatly expanded for IT leaders and the employee groups they serve.

As early adopters test Windows 8 and share their experiences and corporate employees have the chance to get a feel for the new devices, IT and business leaders will be in a better position to evaluate the system for their businesses. PC Helps will continue to run this Windows 8 Pulse Survey at periodic intervals throughout the coming year.