Our Readers Don’t Care About Windows 8

Last month, leaked features of Microsoft Windows 8 caused excitement within the industry – but not, apparently, amongst eWEEK Europe readers.

More than 70 percent of you say you have no interest at all in Windows 8, when offered a choice from a tasty selection of possible new features and asked which was your favourite. The big thumbs-down came from a poll on eWEEK Europe which got more than 300 responses over the Bank Holiday period.

We don’t even use Windows?

Microsoft is hoping to build on the comparative success of Windows 7 (which is better than Vista), adding to people’s interest with features such as a funky Kinect-based natural user interface, and a tablet version – which might just arrive before tablets have been superseded by some still more exciting form factor.

All of that, it appears, is wasted on our readers. The biggest group of you (41 percent) have no interest in the next version of Microsoft’s flagship OS, because you do not use Windows.

Following that, around 30 percent of you aren’t interested in Windows 8 because you are happy on Windows 7 or Windows XP. Strangely, no one has contacted us about our omission of the option to say you are happy on Windows Vista.

After that, only a handful of you had anything good to say about any of the leaked features of Windows 8.

Most popular was the Kinect based user interface which got nearly eight percent, while cloud integration got six percent and the tablet interface interested just six percent of you.

Next up was the “Other” answer, a repository of anti-Microsoft abuse, on four percent.

Below that, a few people (3 percent)  liked the App Store idea, and a small blip liked integrated social media.

Amongst our favourite “Other” answers, were “new errors”, “reliability” and  “it will encourage more people to look at non-MS OSes”.

We all know that online polls tend to bring out the extremists, but we’d say that’s a sign Microsoft is going to have to try very hard with its next iteration.

Oh and, if the OS does arrive with new errors, our readers can say “We designed it”.

Thinking again about the cloud?

For our next poll, we want to know if recent news has made cloud computing support evaporate.

Last month Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud suffered an outage which bought several social startups to their knees. Meanwhile, the Sony PlayStation Network data breach has served to renew concerns in enterprises that cloud computing is inherently less secure than private, self-contained data centres. We are interested to know what impact these events will have on your cloud strategy.

If Amazon is on the list of cloud providers you use or are considering using – has this made you reconsider? Or has it shaken your confidence in the cloud, so that you are scaling back any moves to the cloud you are planning.

Or are these just one-off events, of the kind which might just as easily happen in an in-house data centre?  Is your company still a committed cloud user?  Or were you already determined against the supposed new paradigm of computing?

As always, let us know what you think, and use the “Other” option for abuse, or just to tell us what we forgot to put in the poll.