When traveling, it is not unusual for me to see more people with tablet devices in the airport than carrying a laptop. Tablets like the iPad are lighter, boot up much more quickly and give users access to the essentials like email, presentations and web browsing. Tablets offer these features more cheaply than a laptop if all you need is the subset of functionality.
Microsoft has been concentrating a large portion of their development dollars on the cloud in recent years and has fallen behind in the tablet market by all objective measurements. Microsoft is currently developing the successor to Windows 7, currently known by the name Windows 8, which is intended to help them close the gap. Windows 8 will be the first operating system designed to work on both traditional laptop/PC hardware but also on tablet devices. The following link provided by Microsoft will explain some of the features that Windows 8 will include:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/preview
As a business, the question you may be asking is how Windows 8 will affect your business. The good news is we have time to determine that. Windows 8 is not yet available and is currently planned for release sometime in late 2012. Where we see Windows 8 being valuable is in the marriage of the laptop/PC and tablet operating systems. Smart phones are essentially small tablets and the pervasive nature of personal smart phones makes them a challenge for businesses to manage. Smart phones can be configured to access corporate email, line of business applications and cloud applications meaning they need to be secured in the same manner as other network devices. This is currently problematic for many businesses since many employees are using their own phones for business purposes. The hope in marrying the technologies is that perhaps standardization can bring security and supportability to compliment the many benefits that the tablet and mobile markets are bringing to business.
Colden Company has installed and is testing the preview release of Windows 8 to gain familiarity with the new operating system. If you’d like to know more, call us at (888) 600-4560, email us at info@coldencompany.com, see us on Facebook , or follow us on Twitter@coldenco.