Windows 10, is it finally time to upgrade?

Source Gartner and Microsoft.com

http://www.gartner.com/document/2876117
http://blogs.windows.com/business/2014/09/30/introducing-windows-10-for-business/

With Microsoft rolling out Windows 10 this year, will it finally be time to upgrade from Windows 7?  According to the Gartner article Windows 7 will be End of Life in 2020.  While five years seems like a long time, we also had a long time to get rid of Windows XP and there are still many organizations out there running XP.  To be honest, if Microsoft had not ended support for XP I do not believe Windows 7 would be nearly as popular.  From an administrators standpoint it was a very simple OS to manage, and it still astounds me to this day that Microsoft never added the functionality in Windows 7 to alert users when their password would be expiring.

Looking through these articles they mention that Microsoft brought back the start menu,another thing I never understood why so many people complained and Microsoft refused to bring back even with Windows 8.1.  I have yet to see any organization deploy 8.1.  Most home PC's these days are deployed with Windows 8 and users are completely confused with how it operates.  Hopefully Windows 10 solves this.

Looking through the enhancements, I believe the security ones will be what drives organizations to deploy sooner rather than later.  A unified security model built into the product might allow some organizations to eliminate the need for separate products to do this.

They also discuss multiple update options, I'm not sure about that, from a security perspective I want my systems to have the most up-to-date patches available, even those systems that are not internet facing can still have virus's introduced to them through thumb drives or other removable media.  I do understand wanting a few days with new patches to ensure that they do not cause unforeseen problems, but this new patching scheme does not seem to be designed for this issue.

In my organization we'll be running Windows 10 through it's paces in the beta time-period to see how our existing applications might work with it and start to build our lessons learned now in order to help users make the transition when it's needed.