@aqk
There was never anything wrong with Windows 7 (from a technological perspective) other than "snap" was on by default and the up button was missing. Snap can be disabled easily and Classic Shell fixes the up button.
The VDI licencing changes, however, were atrocious and are the only reason XP remains in my estate.
Windows 2000 was godlike. An excellent operating system that simply wasn't worth replacing until XP SP2 came around and fixed the unbelievably bad RTM release.
I said "why upgrade to Windows XP" when it was the shitty RTM release. I became a champion of Windows XP when it stopped sucking. Vista was a turd and I skipped it with the rest o fhte world. We jumped all over Windows 7 - carefully modified to suck less - almost immediately. Windows 8 is a turd and 8.1 is no better. Maybe Windows 9 will be workable. (Seriously doubt it. It'll probably be touch only, or "touch + kinect". Maybe "wave your testicles to select." If you don't have testicles, oh well, Microsoft is perfectly happy alienating half of any given market until it has cumulatively alienated everyone in all markets.)
So I call bullshit. I won't be buying Windows 8. Windows 7 lasts until 2020; I'll stick with that unless and until something better comes along. In terms of something better, let's examine:
1) OSX doesn't demand $100/endpoint/year for each endpoint I use to remotely connect to my Mac. That's a huge plus. It doesn't have a native RDP-speed remote connectivity server, that's bad. Teamviewer 9 is finally as fast as RDP, however, it eats a lot of CPU and is $600/year/user. That's still better than Microsoft's pricing - fuck you I'm not paying $30K if I use 300 different devices to connect to my home VM, which I did in 2012 - but $600/year/user for viable remote connectivity is still pretty steep.
2) Linux - in the form of Weyland - finally has an RDP server. The FreeRDP server code was ported into Weyland and it's fast. That's groovy, but the downside is that *dun dun dun*, it doesn't work yet. That said, what's on the table as a beta is damned close and it's only a couple of years out from full release. It costs me sweet fuck all to remotely access a Weyland system.
So, what to invest in? I could invest in Windows 8. Then 9. Then 10...paying Microsoft a tithe at each turn and then paying them more for the right to access that system remotely. (Thus meeting my business and workflow requirements.)
Alternately, I could take roughly one quarter of the same total amount of money I would spend on Microsoft licences and "upgrades", CALs and "remote usage rights" between today and 2020 and port every last one of the legacy Windows apps I have to Linux and/or standards-compliant HTML-5/CSS/JavaScript/etc.
I pick the latter option because once I've done it, I'm free. And I have a saleable product in the form of the apps I've just invested a few hundred thousand into porting.
This isn't about sour grapes. It's business. Microsoft is no good for the future of my company or that of my clients. As that is the case there is no logical reason to continue to use their software.
That's without even getting into "the interface sucks, Microsoft doesn't listen to customers, pushing us into an American cloud which I - as a Canadian - want nothing to do with."
I don't have to go there to determine that Microsoft is unsustainable. I just have to do the math. Is Windows licensing sustainable in the long term for my business? Absolutely not. Even supporting us on Windows 7 out to 2020 will come damned close to breaking us given the remote usage rights bullshit Microsoft makes us jump through.
The quicker the exit, the better for my business and the more money in my pocket as a business owner. That - right there - is what matters.