I told you so – Enterprises may resist upgrading to Windows 8, analyst says

OK so once again, the big blogs are arriving late at the table.

For the past year, on this website, I have been predicting that Windows 8 in 2012 would be a disaster and now, it seems that other blogas are trying to wise up too.

Heck, I even talked about this in my article “Windows 8 will come out in 2013/2014 not 2012” barely a week or two ago.

Some excerpts from the computerworld article.

Computerworld – Enterprises now in the midst of migrating to Windows 7 are unlikely to repeat that same work in just two years with Windows 8, an analyst said today.

“They would certainly like to upgrade only to every other edition,” said Michael Silver of Gartner, referring to businesses. “If Windows 8 comes out in two years, I think that’s likely to happen, that many [enterprises] will be very suspect about migrating to the next release.”

Silver’s comments came after the Dutch arm of Microsoft announced that the follow-on to Windows — dubbed “Windows 8” by most, if not by Microsoft — will ship in two years, or in 2012.

That timeline fits earlier Microsoft statements that said Windows is on a three-year development plan.

The remark about Windows 8 — “Microsoft is on course for the next version of Windows. But it will take about two years before ‘Windows 8’ [is] on the market,” the Microsoft Netherlands blog stated Friday — has since been scrubbed from the post. Tom Warren of Neowin.net was the first to report on the Dutch posting.

The fact that Microsoft scratched the Windows 8 reference came as no surprise to Silver or Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash. research firm that tracks only Microsoft’s moves.

“If Microsoft starts talking up Windows 8 now, it risks slowing momentum for Windows 7,” said Cherry in an e-mail reply to questions.

Not rocket science.

Microsoft should be getting the message hopefully. Upgrades should be based on quantifiable, justifiable business reasons and not on arbitrary timelines..

We’ll see…