We're actively avoiding it because of the interface issues, but even if Microsoft restored the start button and desktop there's no business need for an upgrade.

There may be businesses that will benefit from of the new features, but we're not one of them.

A lot of businesses jumped from XP to 7. Maybe Microsoft has a chance to hold on to them if 9 isn't garbage. Scarily, I also see a possibility that business start jumping ship to Apple, Ubuntu and/or some Google ChromeOS offering on the desktop, and Active Directory, Exchange, and MSSQL servers the last remnants of Microsoft operating systems in the enterprise.

Granted, I think it's a slim chance, and I might be crazy.

Apple, yes (through BYO and the iPhone/iPad trojan horses). The rest, probably not. Any large business with an IT department worth its salt would steer well clear of "supportless" nonstandard oddities like ChromeOS.

But a googleOS that just connects to google services, supplimented with a few apps? I could see that making headway in small businesses.

They actively avoided upgrading to IE-anything-above-6 as well. It's hard to draw a lot of conclusions from these articles.

For good reason. IE7 was even worse than 6.

IE8 works on Windows XP too...

And probably breaks some browser-based enterprise apps that are bug-dependent on IE6.