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Feel like you're being herded onto Windows 10? Well, you should
Microsoft's IE11 browser push to flip business
Comment Roll up, roll up for Windows 10, the greatest show on Earth! Forget everything you think you know or might have heard. THIS changes everything.
Windows 7 and Windows 8? Pah. THIS is the one you want.
Yes, the bandwagon on the Windows 10 hype machine is trundling along, and its online followers are hailing its game-changing characteristics. Just look at the eye-catching Cortana digital assistant, and marvel at Edge – the new web browser that's the most standards-compliant effort ever to emerge from Redmond.
Buy the bait on HoloLens, Xbox streaming, and Universal Apps, too, while you can. Windows 10 won’t mean anything to those who matter – the big businesses with the huge budgets that keep Microsoft rolling in billions of dollars.
Yes, the Start menu and desktop paradigm – tossed aside for the Metro touch-friendly user interface – are back, and they are front and centre once more.
And yes, a new version of Office is coming, and there’s all the usual talk of improved performance and security.
But CIOs tell the Reg that if they do a desktop refresh, they'll move from Windows XP to Windows 7. A handful of brave souls have gone, or are going, to Windows 8.
Huge swathes will wait six months to a year or more after Windows 10's release to move, according to an April poll by System-Center partner Adaptiva. The wait-a-year number is 49 per cent, but for the really large accounts – more than 100,000 systems – that number jumped to 80 per cent.
And that's in spite of Microsoft doing all it can to grease the skids: claiming Windows 10 will work on existing PCs running Windows 7 or 8, making Windows 10 free for download up to a year after the July 29 official release, and forcing automatic updates on people, whether they want them or not.