My experience is that it's a love/hate relationship. Often the IT management prefers to run with Microsoft if they can because it's already interated into the existing infrastructure. And Microsoft has very good salespeople that can tell these managers how well a new product integrates with their existing Windows platform. Any new platform threatens to add more support and more work and contains lots of unknowns.

The "lower parts" of IT often knows more about the pain points of certain Microsoft products and have more hate then love, or at least are more open to consider alternatives.

Microsoft has a _lot_ of enterprise software that is not easy to replace for a big company, not to mention third party software that runs on Windows. And some of that software works pretty well.

Microsoft screwing up their mobile strategy has now shown the IT departments at most major companies that iOS and Android devices can work just fine, and this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft dominance in the enterprise.

Enterprise IT as in systems for end users (you can call it Commercial IT). The IT guys themselves will not use Win 8 Pro / Surface of course. Just the business users. But Enterprise IT departments make the purchasing decisions.

It all depends on scale. Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it. OS X might, but no one has tried so far. MS Office is the killer here, if you can't run it, you're dead. That's why MS was caught so surprised when the iPad took off, against all logic.

Windows 7 is perfectly suited as an enterprise solution. Based on how many companies still use XP - I think we've got a good 10 more years of use from win 7.

Once it is no longer tenable to use it, you'd better hope microsoft have developed a usable windows version for offices, because I don't think live tiles updating me on my social network is exactly a selling point in an enterprise solution...

Yes, that makes sense. I was thrown of by 'IT guys'. But in 50k employees worldwide corps in the EU at least I see a lot of business guys doing a lot of their work on iPads and Macbooks now. Anecdotal: a few business friends of mine working for energy and pharma now make their presentations on the iPad directly in Keynote and present it from the iPad. They don't touch PPT anymore. The Windows machine (or Macbook) only switches on for Word (hardly ever) or Excel.

Same with finance sector. Everyone has iPads. We spent the majority of the last year optimising our web app so it works nicely on iOS. We're even doing offline apps soon for data collection.

People don't even use Excel now - our platform is powerful enough to cover all of the normal use cases in the financial sector.

I work in the financial sector, 80000+ employees. Office, Visio, Project, Active Directory, SQL Server, Server, etc. all play a huge role in our PC structure and end user environments.

We also have massive IBM deployments including MVS and Unix (z/OS, AIX, DB2, Oracle, etc.) that run most all of the back-end banking.

Microsoft in the front-end, IBM/Unix in the back. Gotta say, the front end, although more complicated, is more easily managed and deployed. I could never see a replacement for it, not yet anyway.

Edit: No, iPads won't play nicely with this setup.

Our guys are mainly in the field so its probably a different model.

> Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it.

Tell that to Google.

> OS X might

For LDAP and Kerberos, OS X is much less configurable than Linux and the number of tools is less. So if Linux is not good enough, how could OS X even stand a chance? Because of Office for Mac? It's much worse than the Windows version, many documents are not rendered correctly, VBA works poorly, especially for Excel, Exchange support is not on par with the Windows version, many features are missing and Mac users hate the program.

You have google docs on the ipad, in fact on anything with an internet connection, which let you import/export office files.

Until Google decides to kill it. Or kill the features you find useful...

This here is the problem with web-based services, and the advantage of Microsoft Office.

If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it.

Of course also the difference is that I paid for MS Office while I haven't paid a cent for Google Docs.

| If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it.

Individuals with that version installed can use it, but you can't get new licenses for more employees, and you won't be able to upgrade to get new features. You might also be wary of applying bugfix patches in case your key feature gets zapped. Also, user support for your feature will dry up eventually.

"Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it" - yep, it costs too much. No... wait, it's free. There's no deployment tools... no... wait, there are... There's no good office softw... nevermind. No one has ever... wait, there's that town in Germany. I give up. Why isn't Ubuntu suitable? It even comes with an RDP client so you can use Windows-only programs remotely...

Arguably management tools for all those devices, but that is very rapidly changing. The real reason is that no body has done it and said "this is how you do it" and not that many IT guys are in a position to decide to try it and take the risk. The only technical reason would be custom apps built for window or .net, otherwise all of the pieces are there to do it for most businesses.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice doesn't work as well as MS Office. Google Docs doesn't replicate all of the functionality that MS Office offers, and doesn't work as well. The productivity difference[1] would easily be worth over $200/person/month for people who use Office a lot.

[1] From features that Google Docs and to a lesser extent, LibreOffice, don't have or work poorly, and speed especially vs Google Docs.

the only area where I can see this as being a problem is with Excel. For the others, use a web-authoring tool. Why create a MB document in Word, to attach to a SharePoint page, then send a link to every pointing out the new document? Excel has some specialized math functions (and data presentation abilities) that are beyond LO/OO. But I think it's such a small percentage of people that need that functionality, you could replace MSO w/ LO/OO and most everyone would say 'meh' and go back to work.

This is hearsay but what I understood is that there is no suitable large scale alternative for MS Active Directory and that it doesn't play well with Linux setups as it does with Windows. I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I would, maybe someone with more experience in this kind of management can chime in.

from personal experience it is a bit harder (or was, last time I checked) to manage file permissions vs Windows. As far as AD, Linux has had LDAP (which AD is based on) for quite a while.