Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck
- Reference: 1672927215
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/01/05/corporate_enterprise_windows_11_pilots_/
- Source link:
According to figures from Statcounter, a web analytics service that has tracking code installed on 1.5 million websites, Windows 11 was running on [1]16.93 percent of global PCs in December . This compares to 16.12 percent and [2]15.44 percent in each of the prior two months. The desktop version of Windows 10 was on 68.01 percent.
Steve Kleynhans, research vice president of Digital Workplace Infrastructure and Operations at market researcher Gartner, told The Reg the numbers collated by Statcounter are in the “right ballpark” and where he’d expect them to be.
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“Most businesses have avoided making any substantial move to Win 11 so far, waiting for the first significant update. Now that 22H2 has shipped and we have gotten past the year end, I see a lot of enterprises planning fairly quick uptake,” he said.
[4]
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“A lot of organizations are in or starting pilots this month, and planning to move new purchases over to Win 11 in the next few months once they are comfortable. Upgrades of existing systems are likely to take longer as there isn’t really a huge need until later in 2024 when the end of life for Win 10 starts looming,” Kleynhans added.
Microsoft will continue to support at least one Windows 10 release until October 14, 2025, though as Reg readers know, customers can continue to pay for custom support to keep receiving patches, firmware updates and more but it gets pricier.
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Corporations tend to adopt a wait and see attitude before widely adopting a new OS, typically this is 12 to 18 months after launch. Consumer adoption hasn’t exactly set the world alight and some of the design choices possibly deterred folk, as did the [7]hardware requirements .
[8]Microsoft: Whoops, Patch Tuesday might screw your database connections
[9]Windows Subsystem for Linux now packaged as a Microsoft Store app
[10]Windows 10 – a 7-year-old OS – is still having problems with the desktop and taskbar
[11]Microsoft tests 'upsells' of its products in Windows 11 sign-out menu
Kleynhans told us "most users [in businesses] are not nearly as invested in the UI changes as a lot of tech people are.
"The feedback we get from most IT shops who have started testing is that their users settle in pretty quickly and are pleased that it looks more like their phone with the icons instead of tiles. And they do notice the generally better consistency across the UX which provides a more polished feeling," he added.
Microsoft [12]launched Windows 11 on October 22 2021 , even though it was never supposed to happen: Microsoft advised in 2015 that Windows 10 would constantly evolve with new features added, negating the need to wait for the next major release. It was described by Microsoft as "Windows as a service."
When it landed, Microsoft talked up the new security features in Win 11, including hardware root of trust via Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, Secure Boot, hypervisor-protected code integrity, and lest we forget, hardware-enforced stack protection.
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Yet the hardware requirements Microsoft opted for meant it would [14]not install on devices that didn't incorporate the latest TPM-equipped processor. Workarounds helped but weren't an elegant solution. Lansweeper said more than 40 percent of the devices tested across 60,000 organizations [15]failed to pass the CPU test .
Microsoft reckons it is already seeing some wider adoption of its latest OS by corporates. Speaking in October on a Q1 earnings calls covering the three months ended September, CEO Satya Nadella said: "Accenture, for example, has deployed Windows 11 to more than 450,000 employees' PCs, up from just 25,000, seven months ago, and L'Oreal has deployed the operating system to 85,000 employees."
Windows 12, anyone? Expected release date is next year. ®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/02/windows_11_statcounter/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y7cCLkeMYkdF1bFqE45PTgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y7cCLkeMYkdF1bFqE45PTgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y7cCLkeMYkdF1bFqE45PTgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y7cCLkeMYkdF1bFqE45PTgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/09/windows_11_requirements/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/08/microsoft_windows_update_odbc/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/23/wsl_microsoft_store_default_version/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/17/microsoft_windows_10_fix/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/08/windows_tests_ads_in_windows_11/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/05/windows_11_in_detail/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y7cCLkeMYkdF1bFqE45PTgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/25/windows_11_processor/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/10/windows_11_adoption/
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Windows 8 was "fine" as well if you ignored everything they changed from Windows 7, so was Vista. I think we should maybe raise our expectations a little.
It's also worth mentioning that Windows 10 wasn't good at launch either, it was good eventually
It's also worth mentioning that Windows 10 wasn't good at launch either, it was good eventually...
still bloated. remove bloat. run win update. bloat returns. One time through the Spin Cycle Fantastique is enough for me, thanks.
Windows 8 was actually great, same with Vista. Both of them represented big leaps forward in terms of under the hood improvements. Vista got stuck in a development hell because decades of decisions made in Windows NT/2000, made before the Internet existed, and when the product was intended for enterprise use, meant that XP pushed the codebase about as far as it could go without a major refactoring. But the end result brought us a 3D hardware accelerated GUI, loads of security improvements, and a more solid foundation that could be used for future versions of Windows. Windows 7 was just a warmed over Vista that really didn't offer much except a rather obvious clone of the Mac OS X Dock. Windows 8 was another crucial release that brought things like better support for multi-core CPUs in the process scheduler, more security hardening, and a lot of core tools (like Task Manager) got a facelift for the first time... ever, really. Windows 11 is another pivotal release by again increasing security, this time turning on by default a lot of hardware security functions from Windows 10, refinements to the process scheduler again (of great importance for anyone running a 12th or 13th gen Intel CPU), and has represented the largest effort to unify the disparate designs of various Windows components since Windows 95. I will grant that MS did a terrible job of explaining a lot of their reasoning behind CPU support, and their decision to use the unfinished 10X UI is a little baffling, but on the whole the OS is a significant step forward.
I just don't get why people are so hung up on a branding decision. Windows 11 is just a name, the underlying OS is still fundamentally the same as Windows 10. Who cares!? You can still do all the same things you did before, so who cares what they call it? Call it Windows GooGoo-GaaGaa for all I give a rats arse. The name is meaningless.
It’s not the name change or what’s under the hood that’s the problem normally it’s the GUI changes that piss people off. If they just changed the underlying code and less of the GUI and UX then people probably wouldn’t complain. As you mention Win 8 why didn’t the Metro, sorry TIFKAM start menu stick around in Win 10? Nothing to do with it being a pain in the ass to use by any chance?
Great now I’m going to have nightmares about that bloody TIFKAM pissing off the CEO again.
"Windows 1 0 is basically fine, it covers the base of pretty much everything most people in most businesses will need ... once you tell it to sit still, shut up , and stop thinking for itself."
FTFY, and this is exactly why nobody seems to want Windows 11. The problems you list re contextual menus only serve to hammer home that point.
My Surface tablet at work was upgraded to Win 11 and it’s nice and fast but there are things I really don’t like. I’ve always had my taskbar on the left hand side of the screen since it was possible to do so. I’m not talking about the start button which you can move to the left if you like but the task bar. This isn’t possible on Windows 11 without downloading a third party software utility which being a corporate environment I can’t do. It used to be possible via a registry change but not anymore.
The start button doesn’t show all the programs unless you click a second button to show you all the programs. Not a problem for some (or even most) but annoying for me because the pinned programs don’t include the ones I use most. Even if I remove the already pinned ones and add mine they just go back to the way they were before. Now this may well be a corporate setting but it’s really frustrating. It always includes the “Tips” program that I have uninstalled four times now and it keeps coming back like the undead. The solution to this is pin things to the task bar instead but that brings up another issue. Going back to the Taskbar you can’t have a double height taskbar anymore for reasons that pass understanding. Possibly as a result of this you now can’t ungroup icons on the taskbar at all, i assume to save space on there. I only had outlook open with a few emails open when I first used it after the upgrade, but despite this there was only one icon on the task bar. That’s not very helpful and
Then they’ve mucked about with the UI of progs for no reason that I can see and in doing so it has also changed some of the way those progs work. Paint being a good example of this, once something was selected on screen if you rotated it, you could still move it around with the cursor keys. Now you have to click on the selected area with a mouse before it is movable with the cursor keys, which is frustrating. Especially if you only wanted to move it a pixel and your clicking moved it from where it originally was. The scroll bars are also crap now.
Little things that in an of themselves wouldn’t be a real pain in isolation, combined they’re a huge bugbear for me and from reading on the internet others too.
".. more like their phone..."
"... and are pleased that it looks more like their phone ..."
It seems to me that the whole idea that your business desktop PC should 'look more like your phone' is wrong and actually detrimental to productivity.
Re: ".. more like their phone..."
I'd personally be rather disappointed if my PC's OS looked anything like the interface on [1]my phone .
[1] https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Nokia-5310-SIM-Free-Feature-Phone/dp/B0876SXM35
Re: ".. more like their phone..."
It seems to me that the whole idea that your business desktop PC should 'look more like your phone' is wrong and actually detrimental to productivity.
Amen to that.
However I just checked and on my phone when I press the equivalent of the start button all the software is listed not just the pinned ones. So it’s looking less like my phone not more.
Re: ".. more like their phone..."
"...detrimental to productivity."
Needed the free VS Studio 2022 on Win10... it tells me I need to upgrade my "operating system" (not Windows... OS!!***"
Needed the free VS Studio 2019 on Win11 and it tells me of compatibility problems and tells me to upgrade VS.
Either way, detrimental.
*** The fact it asked me to upgrade my "operating system" is ironic as I was running Win10 in a VM on KUbuntu.
Re: ".. more like their phone..."
To me, it looks like a knock-off version of MacOS. And, when I am using it alongside a real version of MacOS, this gets confusing. The different look reminds me to do Windows stuff to get things done rather than Mac stuff.
No surprise here...
With Windows 10 going EoL in October 2025 and nothing other than Windows 11 being offered, it is obviously enterprises will be getting serious about the W10->W11 migration.
With my clients the roadmap is:
FY 2022/23 - Assess W11 migration
FY 23/24 - Precursor migrations eg. servers, move to cloud etc. .
FY 24/25 - Migrate desktops.
FY25/26 - Contingency
L'Oreal, huh?
For them it's just cosmetics...
I can't wait for all of the Windows haters to come out of the woodwork and list all the reasons why Win11 will never catch on, despite making exactly the same noises around this time after the Win10 release.
Windows 11 is basically fine, it covers the base of pretty much everything most people in most businesses will need (Looking at you, Excel). It has problems, because this is still Microsoft we're talking about but it's a perfectly functional operating system once you tell it to sit still, shut up and stop thinking for itself.
Except for the contextual menus. The new ones can go to hell as they're so non-functional that they may as well only contain the button that opens up the old context menu so that you can do whatever you wanted to do before but with an extra click in the way.
Now I'm going to go and hide in a hole before I hear you all coming after me in your attack helicopters.