Of course, there's still a massive market for Windows PCs among enterprise and power users, but as more and more enterprise software goes on the web, Windows becomes less of a requirement for businesses. The majority of business users could easily get by on a chromebook.

This is something that's frequently enough claimed, but it doesn't actually work out in practice.

The gotcha is that every enterprise has legacy software, and much of that legacy software is heavily tied to the desktop. It may be dependent on old VB versions, old Java versions, there's even still a lot of Lotus (spit) Notes (spit) out there.

Agreed, and tbf, I did qualify my assertions (see bolded parts). Right now, there is plenty of core LOB legacy stuff, but it is gradually changing and moving to the web.

And while I was probably overstating the case to say that the majority of business users could get by, I wasn't pulling that out of thin air.

To give a concrete example, my wife works in Human Resources and is changing jobs at the moment. In her old job, she had a Windows laptop, used Office, etc. In one of the new roles she applied for, they told her she'd get a chromebook.

The point is that it's an (admittedly slowly) shrinking market, and I say that as someone who makes their living from writing desktop software. Of the three biggest players in the tech industry, Apple have pretty much transitioned to mobile and Google never cared in the first place, but it's gotta be worrying Microsoft.

Of course, there's still a massive market for Windows PCs among enterprise and power users, but as more and more enterprise software goes on the web, Windows becomes less of a requirement for businesses. The majority of business users could easily get by on a chromebook.

This is something that's frequently enough claimed, but it doesn't actually work out in practice.

The gotcha is that every enterprise has legacy software, and much of that legacy software is heavily tied to the desktop. It may be dependent on old VB versions, old Java versions, there's even still a lot of Lotus (spit) Notes (spit) out there.

In amongst that mess there are going to be applications that are absolutely essential to the running of the enterprise. It may be old, it may be cruddy, it may be held together with sellotape and rubber bands, but it works and it must keep working. You cannot break that software and you cannot move to a platform on which it no longer works.

The obvious ideal world solution is The Great Rewrite, but most enterprises never do that. They may no longer have the source code, even if they do have it they may no longer have staff that fully understand the source code, and in any case The Great Rewrite is a major project that diverts staff and funds from the day-to-day core business of the enterprise.

So the cruddy old legacy software stays as-is, the IT guys perform unsung feats of heroism to keep it working, and the shiny future of everything being web-based and capable of being run on a Chromebook never happens (or best case only happens in startups, who will eventually become the enterprises with 20-year-old cruddy software - this time web-based - in 20 years time).

Or in the case of one company I worked at the IT security guys simply don't trust anything new. The company moved nearly all of its production over to Trello and had been using it for everything for a year and a half before security found out. When they found out Trello was being used security didn't check what it was for and just deleted the accounts and all the work then blocked it. This being a large financial trading company the loss of work cost them tens of millions. ITs response? You should only be using office.

ITs response? You should only be using office.

That sounds pretty horrible.

I hope managements response was to fire IT and sue them for damages.

If not, the customers of said financial trading company should sue the trading company for losing their money out of incompetence.

For me, every Windows that came after Windows XP was the worst Windows ever, until finally Windows 7 came out (which was maybe the biggest positive surprise about software that I've had in my life).

Windows 10 looks much closer to Windows 7 once you have removed all that app shit from the start menu (and at least it does have a start menu), so it is definitively an improvement over this abomination Windows 8. But, still no Aero effects. Really, you still have to pay the ROP/RAM cost for the DWM and you don't get the (useless but funny) optical gimmicks for it in return?

More useless services that you have to disable. Metro crap now running under desktop, too. Login still unusable. Apps that you have shut down still running, like in Win8.

But at least it looks like Win7, well kind of, a bit. Which makes it better than Win8 already.

More online shit, but in this case, that isn't Microsoft's fault -- Canonical and Mozilla started it. Ubuntu tells Amazon what you're typing into your unity thingy, and when you type the name of a host on your local network into the address bar, Firefox will call Google and open a popup note "Oh wait, did you really mean to make a connection to that host?". Right, I don't want host names on my local network or the names of programs I use or any other information being sent to fucking Google or Amazon or anyone else without asking me first.

So now Windows has that same thing built in, too. Great. Will have to block taskbar.exe on the firewall. Since you already have to block explorer.exe, soon you can block the complete machine.

ITs response? You should only be using office.

That sounds pretty horrible.

I hope managements response was to fire IT and sue them for damages.

If not, the customers of said financial trading company should sue the trading company for losing their money out of incompetence.

As someone also working in the financial industry I can tell you, this is how IT Security works around here... I am amazed it took them 6 months to notice, and Trello wasn't locked down from the start.

But keeping ANY kind of data on remote servers outside of the company -> Prepare for IT Security Nukes incoming.

Management most probably didn't fire Security or IT, they did what they are paid for: preventing people from using whatever IT technology they want and instead forcing them unto the company standart stacks... if that is good for the employees that have to use it, most probably not. But it helps to lock down everything and make it more secure, which is prio #1 in the financial industry... even more important than saving money.

If somebody got fired, then all the guys that started using Trello without asking security first if they did the right thing. They put the whole company at risk by doing so, because if the wrong data was put on the Trello server, every hacker that got wind of it might have just harvested it from there. And that might mean client data.

If client data leaks out, thats the biggest catastrophe you can have in this industry.... worse than google or facebook loosing some millions of passwords.

If somebody got fired, then all the guys that started using Trello without asking security first if they did the right thing.

Fair point.

Still think it could be handled better by IT though.

Hopefully the "loss of work" was just things that could be re-done so the loss is just in hours, and nothing important got lost.

For me, every Windows that came after Windows XP was the worst Windows ever, until finally Windows 7 came out (which was maybe the biggest positive surprise about software that I've had in my life).

So... Vista then? :)

'cos that was the only version of Windows between XP and 7.

ITs response? You should only be using office.

That sounds pretty horrible.

I hope managements response was to fire IT and sue them for damages.

If not, the customers of said financial trading company should sue the trading company for losing their money out of incompetence.

As someone also working in the financial industry I can tell you, this is how IT Security works around here... I am amazed it took them 6 months to notice, and Trello wasn't locked down from the start.

But keeping ANY kind of data on remote servers outside of the company -> Prepare for IT Security Nukes incoming.

Management most probably didn't fire Security or IT, they did what they are paid for: preventing people from using whatever IT technology they want and instead forcing them unto the company standart stacks... if that is good for the employees that have to use it, most probably not. But it helps to lock down everything and make it more secure, which is prio #1 in the financial industry... even more important than saving money.

If somebody got fired, then all the guys that started using Trello without asking security first if they did the right thing. They put the whole company at risk by doing so, because if the wrong data was put on the Trello server, every hacker that got wind of it might have just harvested it from there. And that might mean client data.

If client data leaks out, thats the biggest catastrophe you can have in this industry.... worse than google or facebook loosing some millions of passwords.

Nobody was fired. It wasn't client data it was company IT production data. The losses were the companies own in terms of a years worth of IT production reports, estimates, roadmaps etc.. gone.

For me, every Windows that came after Windows XP was the worst Windows ever, until finally Windows 7 came out (which was maybe the biggest positive surprise about software that I've had in my life).

So... Vista then?

'cos that was the only version of Windows between XP and 7.

I miss windows 3.11 :(

Fair point.

Still think it could be handled better by IT though.

Hopefully the "loss of work" was just things that could be re-done so the loss is just in hours, and nothing important got lost.

I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to put anything "important" on Trello (well, certainly there are people stupid enough to do that, at least from securities point of view)... yes, the project planning and schedule might also be of some importance, but that is nothing that couldn't be redone. This is a kind of "loss of work" companies usually suck up without much second thought (if they can fire somebody for it, they will do that, but the amount of money lost is nowhere near the amount money that would really hurt a big financial company).

The important stuff usually is stored in special DBs on the companys mainframes, using systems dating back to the 70's and 80's sometimes and still being written in Cobol partly. There is a danger somebody copies stuff out of this DBs and puts it on an inapropriate system like Trello for example, the main datastore is pretty secure and will not be affected from the Trello cleanse in the slightest bit.

Yes, at least in this industry, change is only good when its only affecting the client advisors iPad toys

Just as an additional anecdote: how often do you think it happens that company not only run into extended support, but actually have to pay for additional support after the end of life of a product? I guess it happens quite a lot... I know it does here.

Nobody was fired. It wasn't client data it was company IT production data. The losses were the companies own in terms of a years worth of IT production reports, estimates, roadmaps etc.. gone.

Well, its the IT securities job to make sure that it isn't client data. The only way to make sure is to not allow such a thing from the beginning (nobody can guarantee you that there is NO client data in free text fields or documents). Because it already happened, cleanest way to deal with it was to nuke it. Giving people time to secure their data back to company servers might have saved some money, but would have meant some additional weeks of being exposed to this lethal data leak risk for the company.

Somebody must have made the decision to rather pay the money to repair the internal damage afterwards instead of risking a far greater external damage that might have been irreparable.