Change is not always a good thing...
I see a lot of comments supporting Win 8 and a lot that don't.
I've been playing with a new Win8 PC for a couple of days now and, as an IT person, I can see some interesting features from a consumer context but not from a business point of view. I absolutely will not be considering upgrading our environment to it. I know I'm not alone in thinking this OS is great for touch screen devices but for a business PC user it doesn't provide enough benefits to come close to offsetting the learning curve users will have to go through to become proficient at it. If I've learned anything over the years, users do not like change and yes, we all have to move on eventually, like it or not, but as far as I'm concerned this was a big mistake by MS. The new interface, in a business context, is not useful or beneficial in any discernible way. I find it takes longer to navigate for some things, it's unintuitive (taking away the X in the corner of windows for closing them is annoying!), cluttered and inefficient. I know you can customize the start screen and hit the Windows key and start typing to search for the app you want to launch, etc. and so on. But I have no interest in trying to convince the executives and a lot of other folks that this is a good thing - which it isn't from a productivity point of view. I also realize you can still get to the old Desktop that we all know and love but it's crippled, I know the Start button/menu can be added with 3rd party freeware as well as other available addons to enhance functionality but why MS chose to go down this path for the desktop machine is misguided. I can appreciate their aim to have one common interface so that the rising device market will mesh with the PC experience but I don't think it will work - one size does NOT fit all. I think this is another Vista in the making in that it will be so unpopular for business users that it will be skipped altogether much as Vista was. If MS were to add the option to switch the interface to a full function Win7 style desktop it may save the day for this new OS but otherwise I can see this going down in flames in the business world.
