There's "no reason at all" for the Force India Formula 1 team to upgrade its network operating system to Windows 8, Adrian Collinson, its head of IT, has told Computing.
Force India's systems at both the factory and the track currently run mostly on Windows 7, with the operating system still capable of doing almost everything the team requires.
Further reading SITA 2013: Air France CIO 'disappointed' with Windows 8 Force India IT chief full of praise for BlackBerry and BB10 Microsoft still has 'a way to go' in determining its market for Windows 8, says Network Rail
"We're all Windows 7 based; all our clients run a different mixture of versions of the server OS for the systems we're running. But all the desktops and systems are Microsoft OS based except for our big CFD cluster, which is Linux based," Collinson explained.
When asked about Windows 8, the Force India IT chief said there hasn't been the "dramatic leap" required in capabilities of Microsoft's latest operating system for the team to consider an upgrade.
"There's no reason at all for Windows 8 at the moment – Windows 7 is a very good platform," he told Computing.
"You tend to see hits and misses with Microsoft desktop operating systems – and I know 8.1 is about to come out – but still, they seem to have taken a dramatic leap that with the best will in the world you couldn't see a lot of users taking up yet."
Collinson added that overall Windows 8 is better than Windows 7, but the improvements aren't major enough for him to consider rolling out an upgrade to Force India's 300 employees.
"It doesn't present enough compelling reasons to move to it. I know it's a fundamentally better OS than 7, but it's not a big enough leap to make up for the inevitable grief you're going to get with users changing the interface," he said.
