We've mostly reached steady state acceptance of Windows 8. The initial angst of relearning the user interface still crops up at regular intervals and costs us time we can ill afford. The new big change is that we haven't a Microsoft account, nor do we care for one. This occasionally becomes a challenge to work around. We may have to bite the bullet because the latest Office appears to have no work around. After returning our newly purchased Office to Costco, we've dusted off our many fully owned legacy Offices and made do, so far with no disadvantage.
I feel that Microsoft's new insistence on cataloging every user through a mandatory Microsoft account is an attempt by yet another corporation to collect scads of irrelevant (to us, not to them) personal information that is really none of their concern. They see the success of Google and Facebook and want a piece of that action. Personally, I find this objectionable.
I've begun playing with Fedora and WINE to see if my few Windows-only needs can be accomodated without reference to Microsoft. In the end, it will come down to pain points -- which support infrastructure costs more time.
Around 2010, I spent about a year using Open Office, but ultimately it was too costly. Not everything translates faithfully to and from Microsoft Office, and some of our professional interfaces demand Microsoft Office products. It doesn't require a critical failure to appreciate the high cost of translation errors. For example, some public presentations require PowerPoint, and some proposals require Word formats. Mistranslated elements imply a carelessness and lack of professionalism which can be seen as sufficient cause to avoid such vendors.
I've not seen the value proposition of Microsoft Office upgrades from 2003 to 2007, nor of quite a few Windows upgrades, for some time. The mandatory re-learning of the user interface is costly and entails a worldwide productivity hit. In Office, the change from menus to ribbons was especially costly because even after using it for 5 years we cannot ever be as fast nor productive in the new Office as we were in the older, more hotkey friendly Office. For Windows, our productivity appears to suffer only a temporary productivity hit. We seem to struggle with it for about a month with varying degrees of angst, then except for the odd occasion, we no longer recall what our user issues were.
Call me old fashioned, but I'd prefer that they continually upgrade the underlying engine but preserve the user interface. It would be different if they fixed only the klunky parts and users could clearly see an advantage. Particularly for seldom used functions, completely changing the way things are accessed makes many man-hours of learning obsolete and irrelevant. Imagine if new automobile models worked the same way: "Where's the steering wheel? Woah, how do you stop this thing!"
Bottom line: if they're the market leader, your customers demand their format, and your business depends upon it, you may be forced to stomach whatever they dish up and surrender whatever they require, regardless of its true value proposition.
