News

Most IT Pros Expect To Deploy Windows 10 Within 2 Years

• By Kurt Mackie
• 06/25/2015

IT pros largely won't be rolling out Windows 10 at a brisk pace when the new operating system gets released this year, according to a recent industry survey.

Windows 10 is scheduled for release on July 29 and Microsoft has talked about a fall release also happening this year. Company officials haven't explained this dual-release approach in much detail so many organizations might be unable to describe their specific deployment plans at this time.

Still, a survey conducted by Spiceworks in April and May found that 40 percent of IT pro participants were planning to deploy Windows 10 within the first year of release. The survey also found that 33 percent were planning Windows 10 deployments within two years. Spiceworks' study, "Windows 10: Will it Soar," consisted of 500 participants from North America and the EMEA regions. Spiceworks is a professional network for IT pros.

The combined 73 percent of respondents saying that they had Windows 10 deployment plans within two years was considered to be "huge," according to a Spiceworks blog describing the study. That's because past survey data by Spiceworks showed that 60 percent of organizations had some Windows 7 in their computing environments two years after that OS' release, so interest in Windows 10 seems to be comparatively high.

Another industry survey, conducted by Adaptiva, was a bit more bearish. It found 71 percent of 186 participants saying they'd wait at least six months before deploying Windows 10, with 49 percent planning to wait more than year after the OS' release.

The biggest concern about Windows 10 of the IT pros surveyed by Spiceworks was hardware and software compatibility, as cited by 79 percent. Other concerns were potential software bugs (65 percent), training issues (59 percent), third-party support (51 percent) and the time to complete upgrades (43 percent).

The Spiceworks study described participants as mostly interested in the stability of Windows 10. Top features, according to participants, included the Start Button (64 percent), the free upgrade from Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8/8.1 (55 percent), and enhanced security (51 percent). However, despite the security interest, just five percent of participants said they were interested in Windows Hello, a biometric security feature in Windows 10 aimed at replacing passwords.

As for Edge, Microsoft's newest browser (formerly code-named "Spartan") that will be arriving with Windows 10 along with Internet Explorer 11, "nearly half" of the respondents said they didn't know much about Edge to have formed an opinion about it.

On the mobile side, 48 percent of the respondents were interested in Windows 10 for smartphones and tablets. In practice, though, most were running OSes other than Windows for mobile devices. iOS (81 percent) and Android (77 percent) topped the list. Windows or Windows Mobile was used by "one-third of organizations" surveyed.

The survey participants were predominantly Windows 7 users. Surprisingly, 44 percent were still using Windows XP, an operating system that's no longer supported by Microsoft. Mac OS use was at 29 percent.