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#281
Sigh! You have totally missed the points. Of course, MS can do whatever they want to do with their business. However, making business moves that drive away an established customer base is not conducive to staying in business. Forcing anyone to make unnecessary expenditures, such as replacing existing otherwise perfectly good hardware and software, is a good way to drive customers away. When businesses needed to upgrade from XP, did most of them go to Win 8.0, which would cost them a fortune in employee retraining and, to a lesser degree, hardware and software upgrades? No, they upgraded to Win 7.
Sure we are talking computers here but people do depend on them, especially businesses. If a business is forced to adopt a new, unnecessarily expensive computer infrastructure to stay in operation, that expense has to be absorbed by cutbacks elsewhere. In most cases, the bulk of those cutbacks come in the form of a reduction in force (layoffs) with existing employees having to take on the workload of the ones let go. So, yeah, human lives are affected. Some businesses are more heavily dependent on computers others, making the impact on the business, the employees, and customers even greater. If a business that has had to make cutbacks is the majopr industry of a town, then the entire town is affected.
Small Office/Home Office was the first thing that came to mind but I discarded that because large businesses, small offices, and home offices would all be affected in the same way.
People, such as cognus, and businesses are quick to say how other people should spend their money. They wouldn't be so glib about it if they had to foot the bill for me. I'm on a so called fixed income (it isn't because inflation eats away at it); I have to watch my spending. Same for businesses; they can milk their customers only so much and still keep them. Sure, businesses are beholden to their shareholders but even shareholders should know there are limits to how much a cow can be milked without killing it.
I have almost five years before I will have to upgrade from Win 7 (most likely, I will do start doing so well before the bitter end). That means I will have up to five years to prepare for that migration. Mayhap M$ will have some thing worth upgrading to like they did when I upgraded from XP to Win 7. If not, there will be other options. The first year or so of a new M$ OS tends to be plagued with bugs (that is to be expected), hardware and software who are slow about updating drivers (or refuse to, one of the resons I will never buy anymore HP products), etc. so it's generally better to wait to see how things will sort out. If M$ continues the plan of forcing short term upgrades (such as Win 8.0 to Win 8.1) instead of allowing people to stay with something they are comfortable with (which, sadly, is highly likely), then M$ and I will part company, as will most businesses (if only because of retraining expenses).
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