[wolfgke]

The company that I had an internship at a few years ago (in software development) also pieced together computers from individually selected components for special customers (say, from medical sector or engineering).

At that time customers nearly always insisted that despite Windows 8 would have advantages for them to have Windows 7 installed (if they weren't ordering the computer with only some GNU/Linux distribution installed, as some customers also did). The reason is that often there were employees at the company that ordered the PC which couldn't get along with the new GUI (the same thing also happened for the Ribbon GUI that was introduced with Office 2007; I know people who still prefer the old Office 2003 GUI and only use the current version because they have to).

So already at that time lots of customers were waiting for the version that came after 8.0/8.1.

But Microsoft did the completely wrong thing: While fixing the GUI annoyances with Windows 10 (as far as I have heard) they introduced espionage functionality into Windows 10 - a cardinal sin in many European countries where lots of people are deeply worried about the US spying since the Snowden revelations. Also lots of German companies are very afraid of corporate espionage from the US (at the same level or even more as they fear it from China) - and they have good reasons for being worried - I just say "Enercon":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enercon&oldid=711...