Re: I'm linking rollout to a h/w refresh
@AC - 'you shouldn't be 'hoping' or 'suspecting' anything in such a scenario - you should KNOW when it's a case of betting the business on it. And ISTR that it's already been reported that the consumer version of Win10 (resists the strong urge to call it Fail10, wups!) phones home even when all the options to tell it not to have been switched to tell it not to do so.
IMO, it'd be downright irresponsible to promise anything regarding Windows 10 at the moment, in any environment. I certainly wouldn't do so unless I'd had the thing thoroughly tested for several months in a test environment where if it all went wrong it wouldn't do any real harm. Only once the test results were in would it be responsible to make any promises about the future, OS-wise, particularly in a business environment.
It's one thing for an individual to say that they really aren't concerned about MS data-slurping from their personal kit (as one person has said to me already - their reasoning being that given the extent to which they're on 'social media' adding another in the form of MsSpace in the form of Windows 10 doesn't really matter. Suffice to say that I feel their argument is not a good one), it's a whole 'nother thing for a business, especially one that isn't in the same legal jurisdiction as Redmond.
If I ran a business, I'd be taking a VERY hard look at getting the business off of any dependency on MS software asap. And with the trend towards companies betting the farm on cloud-based software (something else I'm uneasy with, at least insofar as putting company data 'out there' is concerned - buying compute time isn't so bad), for companies that are already doing that, why on earth NOT move to Linux - anything usable via webbrowser doesn't care what your OS is, and even if you go for a paid-for version from the likes of Red Hat or Suse, I'd be astonished if it ended up costing more than buying licences for Windows (not something I have to deal with, so not something I know off the top of my head).
As for any Windows-specific software that's mission-critical, I'd be testing it on Linux via WIne and/or Crossover from Codeweavers and having a chat with the programmers as to whether it might be possible to make anything that didnt run nicely on Linux at the moment to do so in the near future.