Why would I want to kill you ;) Problem is with businesses that demand that software, they are the ones that want things to remain as they are because modernization involves spending cash and they all like to hoard their riches XD
All in all, I like some things under the hood of win8 but overall, businesses will remain on XP and win 7, at least here.

A friend of mine is an in-house lawyer for an investment bank, and she said everyone there gets treated terribly, except the Sales and Marketing people, because they're the ones that really distinguish a bank to the customers. The amount of testing that goes into software where large-scale money transfer occurs is incredible, no wonder they don't want to change it often. Our cash machines here are mainly still WIn95/Win 3.5 based.

You think that's slow, you should try working in the defence industry - I am informed that the new UK nuclear submarines use a variant of WinXP, and are considered cutting-edge...

I know people who built parts of it and WinXP isn't what they use. Secure versions do appear to be 5ish years out of date but they aren't.

I totally understand what you mean. My dad bought some crappy 16bit software for his company without consulting me, because other companies told him it was, as you said, a critical application. Well, I think they've at least opened it a few times. 500 EUR for that crap, and they don't even need to use it for anything. Oh, and it doesn't run on anything newer than XP, yet they're currently using 7 in the offices.

I asked because, if the application is not that terrible and doesn't depend on really outdated crap, maybe it can be redone cheaply in WinRT, thus improving the security in general, among other things.

The last few paragraphs in this article basically sum up how I feel about the Metro UI and 'Start Screen'.

Edit: *'Start Screen'

Terrible article.

30% of everything sold in their store is a pretty good incentive, frankly the app may generate more revenue for them than Windows itself.

win xp mode ftw \o/ XD
This sums situation on the Balkans pretty well, nobody listens to reason, lazy programmers peddling their crappy programs to businesses and then everybody expects admins to bend modern systems to run POS software... Hey at least every day is adventure :D

That it is.

I just loved it when they woke me up at 8 AM, because they were having problems with one printer. Oh, how happy and filled with joy I was when I saw that somebody pulled out the damn cable from the printer. Of course it won't print then.

I printed and framed A4 piece of paper which says:
"I will restart my computer BEFORE I call my administrator"
It is on display in head office. XD

They are trying it out, didn't you watch the video they referred to? They very much said that it was a first impression, and that they would try it further to see if it grew on them.

yes, I looked at the video - they are not biased at all:

"In the video below you can see my first 10 minutes with Windows 8 — and surprisingly, the experience wasn’t as bad as I was expecting."

It's biased, sure. They had low expectations (and it turned out not to be as bad as those expectations). But you can't say they're not giving it a try at least, and they also clearly said they would try it for another week to see if it was just something you had to get used to.

There is already a way to disable the new UI.

Keep using Windows 7.