Oh I don't know. Hypothetical situation. The cost of upgrading if we had all of our dbs on SQL2005 to 2008 to the company would be tremendous. Licenses, hardware, dba time, application folks testing, outage time to do the actual upgrade.. We have 40 servers right now with about 300 dbs. If my boss asks me what is the benefit in spending, say, three quarters of a mill to do this I cannot say we will get that much in savings by upgrading. What if we wait and jump from SQL2005 to 2012 just to stay on a Microsoft supported version and jump over SQL2008. We don't have more than a handful of mid to large dbs here. Most are quite small and won't take advantage of any new features. In SQL 2008R2 the one big benefit I like is using the COMPRESS backup. But, again, for small to midsized dbs that isn't much of a help.

I know of a LOT of companies that are simply jumping over a version... much like the Windows PC operating system. I doubt many companies will upgrade to Win8... heck we are still finishing up upgrading folks to Win7. Last month I was finally upgraded from XP to Win7.