Slashdot Mirror

Um, if you want define "mistake" as "making lots of money", then yeah, they made a "mistake". If you look at usage stats though what you see is a very different picture. For instance, iPhones still dominate in mobile web usage, as well as app usage etc.

No it doesn't. Those stats are for iOS (iPhone + iPad) vs Android phones and tablets. And it's only for wifi traffic. On web traffic over cellular networks, Android devices generate slightly more traffic than iOS devices. Basically your link cherry-picked the one chart favorable to iOS.

If you limit the comparison to just iPhone vs Android phones, Android generates more web traffic. And before you pull out the NetMarketShare data showing iPhone still leading: (1) NetMarketShare gets data from only a few tens of thousands of sites, while StatCounter gets its data from millions of sites. And (2) NetMarketShare's figures are normalized to unique visitors per month. i.e. Someone who visits a site once in a month counts as much as someone who uses the site every day. StatCounter counts web hits, so is measuring actual web usage rather than counting number of users. In other words, more iPhone users browse the web on their phone than Android users, but they don't do much browsing. The hardcore phone browser users are on Android and they generate more web traffic than the larger number of iPhone users who use the browser..

Basically the only lead Apple still has is the iPad in the tablet market, and it's rapidly losing that too. Their share of quarterly tablet sales dropped from a commanding 60% in 2012 to 33% in 2Q2013, and now 29% in 3Q2013. Those are quarterly sales, so iPads probably still comprise the majority of tablets in use, which match with your initial stats showing iOS dominating in wifi-based web traffic.

Perhaps this would have been a better link: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201309-201309-bar

I mean, look at the market share numbers for Windows 8 currently. Windows XP is stomping it. It only just this month beat out MacOS by a tiny margin. Its month over month growth is stagnant.

Could be worse, it could be as bad as Linux's desktop market share which has frankly been shitful for decades. If you really lack the ability to function without a start menu then get a start menu replacement and 8.1 has a boot-to-desktop option, or use an alternative shell like litestep. For a tech site this place really has a lot of whiny braindead bitches that require everything to work as it did before out of the box, god forbid you need to actually do anything to customize it if you don't like the baseline experience.

The Windows 8.1 rollout has hit more hurdles...

... Which affect the 5 people who are actually using Windows 8. The entire interface is an unmitigated disaster. DOSSHELL looked prettier and was more functional than Windows 8. The OS has multiple personality disorder and the interface looks like it was gang-banged by Crayola. Nobody wants to touch it even with a 10 foot pole. :/

Did you notice how this wasn't on the front page of any tech section of any major news site on the internet (Slashdot doesn't count -- it doesn't have a tech section, it is a tech section)? It's because nobody uses it. I mean, look at the market share numbers for Windows 8 currently. Windows XP is stomping it. It only just this month beat out MacOS by a tiny margin. Its month over month growth is stagnant.

This is just another story to add to the growing funeral pyre we're building to honor monkey boy's first major OS released without any input or direction from former CEO Bill Gates. In a few years, I'll be opening specially marked boxes of cereal and finding copies of Windows 8 in it... just like they used to distribute AOL disks in the days of old. Actually... now that I think about it... that may have been where the Metro interface's inspiration came from. Sweet mother of god....

http://www.w3counter.com/trends
http://gs.statcounter.com/
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=0

There is an unexplained trend upwards in Internet Explorer

http://gs.statcounter.com/

Search engine stats for Brazil:

Date Google Babylon Yahoo! Conduit SweetIM Other
2012-08 96.32 2.18 0.53 0.49 0.21 0.27
2013-08 98.38 0.61 0.74 0.12 0.06 0.08

Google US, Babylon Israeli (malware), Yahoo US, Conduit (malware), SweetIM (malware)

Maybe a Portuguese language SE is included in the 0.08% of "Other". For now it would appear that normal Brazilian users would be screwed if they couldn't access the US any longer.

If you look at the last 3 months http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201306-201308, you'll see that the decline has stopped. As of last month, they peg the users of XP at a little over 20%. As the second largest OS, that seems significant to me.

See for example the browsing share for evidence that people who are actually using their smartphone for smartphone tasks are mostly buying iPhones.

I just had a look, and it doesn't seem to be indicating anything even remotely similar to what you're claiming here.

at least in Germany.

Geez, they must really be stupid to use an unusable nerd system instead of the great and fantastic post-pc devices. Probably dont even believe that Adam and Eve rode on dinosaurs through paradise either.

That is the funny thing. Mac market share is closer to Linux desktop market share than it is to Windows. Heck, it is only slightly ahead of Vista. It looks the 10%-15% is an inflated number. The numbers I usually see tend to put it in the 7%-8%.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8&qpcustomd=0
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201206-201306

Now, there is no doubt that hey are making money on that 7%-8% market share, but claiming that everyone is now buying Macs is pure fantasy.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-monthly-201206-201306 A quick look at market share put Google at 90%...with Bing at less than 4% at least in the search arena. So about 22 times larger.

In areas such as online email outlook.com has 420 million (18 February 2013) vs Gmail 425 million (June 2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail ...which I would kindly call a draw.

For their Choosing a Cloud-Based Office Systems http://rcpmag.com/articles/2013/04/23/google-apps-vs-microsoft-office.aspx "In terms of user numbers, Google Apps had about 10 percent of the cloud-office market in 2007, 20 percent in 2009, and between 33 percent and 50 percent in 2012, according to Gartner's analysis." Which again I am going to kindly call it draw.

That is without looking at the servers for Google+; YouTube; Play and Maps where Microsoft does not have a product, or at All those Microsoft servers that deal with activation and updates...and a whole host mysterious information.

The bottom line though is that 4X market share is not right for anything.

The adoption of Apple PCs scales almost linearly with purchasing power, with places like Switzerland at more than 20%
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-CH-monthly-201206-201306-bar

With cheap processing power reaching "good enough" levels for most people in the last years, Macs are going to be more affordable than before.
(We're at the point where you can use an average 2010 PC for almost every common task, which means Macs don't have to include expensive CPUs and lots of RAM etc. to compete.)

If I were Microsoft I'd be somewhat worried about this, definitely more than about Linux distros (which simply don't have the strong economic backing needed for something as complex as a desktop OS).

Secure Boot isn't secure nor is it a security feature. It's sole purpose is to keep Linux off of x86 computers.

Not a problem.

Top 7 Operating Systems From June 2012 to June 2013. Desktop Operating System Market Share, OS Platform Statistics 2003-2013

That said I am getting a great gaming experience using Linux...OpenGL...on an Intel Onboard.(and judging by Steam hardware survey I'm not alone).

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc Steam Hardware survey is a fun read...It list XP as Having over 8% marketshare of Gamers (Everyone gets about 20% XP Marketshare) http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201205-201305

You can't now that. There's no stats for Linux.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201205-201305 you will be one in five users who have not updated from XP

People aren't updating because computers are expensive, Intel and Microsoft take all the profits and walk away with a gross profit margin of over 70%...and new versions of the Microsoft Windows software, are poor tablet interfaces.

If you're buying the latest and greatest gaming cards, you're probably going to want DirectX 10 or 11, good multicore support, and an OS that can handle more than 3-ish GB of RAM.

XP had a 64-bit version and supported multi-core since service pack 2 :). That said I am getting a great gaming experience using Linux...OpenGL...on an Intel Onboard.(and judging by Steam hardware survey I'm not alone).

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc Steam Hardware survey is a fun read...It list XP as Having over 8% marketshare of Gamers (Everyone gets about 20% XP Marketshare) http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201205-201305

they're not even thinking of their phones as smartphones. They don't browse the web,

Perhaps you need to look at different web statistics. Android users do browse the web. But sure keep deluding yourself.

Thanks for the ad hom. Tastes cheesy.

You're right, I had forgotten about these stats on web browsing. Though do note that the numbers for the US look somewhat different from the global ones: here, the iOS percent is above 50 and still growing.

If you can find stats showing Android users spending more per capita on apps, though, I'll be very surprised.

Dan Aris

they're not even thinking of their phones as smartphones. They don't browse the web,

Perhaps you need to look at different web statistics. Android users do browse the web. But sure keep deluding yourself.

The vast majority of people use the stock browser, and defaults in general. Not everyone is a geek.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/04/03/according-to-net-applications-stock-android-browser-usage-is-still-way-out-in-front-of-chrome/

It does not change your point of your comment but netmarketshare http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=1 where the data comes from, has something wrong with the way records data, especially with mobile usage. Its often quoted on Apple sites due to its heavy bias towards Apple(that does not reflect real world use). They have heavily massage figures, and they do not match those of independent larger sources. Here is statcounter http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201205-201305 (Again it does not dispute your point but the source data)

No, it seems it's certainly on decline: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201104-201304

But are the libraries running Windows XP?

This chart seems to suggest that XP's toehold in the UK is only at 16%.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-GB-yearly-2012-2013-bar

More importantly, I think many of the "killer apps" of the modern day are independent of operating system:

This is important. The slashdot crowd can talk about how you can't run most apps on a tablet, but a lot of these apps you just mentioned are made for tablets. No one doubts that MS will maintain a strong presence in the corporate world for a long time, but increasingly people aren't computing with PCs any more, they're using mobile devices. In any case, even in the corporate world, people are losing interest in MS. I do get e-mails about training for ipad users, I have yet to get one for Win8. In fact, IT has banned win8 from its computers thus far.

If you head over to statcounter and add up the iOS plus OS X versus all the windows flavors, you find that the peak in MS dominance of usage share occurred in May, 2009 at 94.33%. The minimum? February, 2013 at 86.04%. Apple is inversely correlated: max at Feb., 2013, minimum at Dec., 2008. This is not a coincidence. Similarly, if you look at Win8 adoption rates, you find that win8 is being adopted at 0.3% of usage share per month. Win7 was adopted at 1.1% per month. Even Vista was adopted at 0.5% per month, a greater adoption rate than Win8!! Microsoft has failed with its newest OS, and moreover the crest of each new OS they've released has been lower and lower. I'll admit that right now that non-MS stuff is a lot like people without a TV, growing, but still insignificant, but just wait until somebody like Valve releases a gaming OS or console based on linux, you could see the usage share of MS start to drop more rapidly.

Android users don't spend money...Or even surf the web as often as iOS users:

Check your spin from your own outdated article that have dubious sources :) "Google Play paid revenue grew by 311 percent since January, Apple's paid revenue only grew by 12.9 percent" reread my comments :)....and this is an outdated article.

As for the browse think it is [was!?] an anomaly of netlink...I'm not even sure if its true their any-more, but the site is borked, a quick look at statcounter http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201203-201303 shows that ios web presence continue to be well below Android :) unsurprisingly.

You should read and verify your links before posting and wasting peoples time, especially mine.

When I search for "browser usage" Chrome typically lists #1: http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-january-2013/ http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

It is getting easier. I eventually reinstalled it because I got tired of not being able to play some youtube videos and wanted to edit a map on OpenStreetMap.

I normally use Click to play on everything (in Firefox), and it does have some pain points. Namely sites that can usually fallback to not using flash, still ask for flash and block it. YouTube does this sometimes even though it is going to work without flash. So does http://gs.statcounter.com/.
Google actually asks for Flash the most out of sites that I use: Google Finance Stocks, Google Voice (download as MP3 instead), Gmail (not useful anyway)...

Many average sites just use Flash for Ads or "Intro Banners" in which case it really is no great loss.

1. 1.Cellphone as a computer, docked to a monitor and a keyboard/mouse.
2. 2.Battery life of a week in a smartphone.
3. 3.Super cheap. (Currently, symbian is the biggest OS worldwide, if you add symbian and S40 together, because it's cheap. See the real stats

The cellphone as a computer is something that might happen, and might benefit those smartphones that come with a full-blown OS (and here is an opportunity for ubuntu). The user would plug the device to a monitor and a keyboard and start working. We already have 1.5GHz processors, +1Gb RAM, and graphics chipsets that support OpenGL. We might see in the future clever ways to dock the smartphone into a monitor and keyboard (maybe wireless displays are in the future, but I doubt it because of bandwidth required). Maybe a dock that has the shape of laptop, only it provides the keyboard and display, but nothing else inside.

Android and iOS might be at a disadvantage for that, because those OS's weren't borne with desktop grade multitasking, file management, etc. (android has multitasking but only has windows in some samsung products), iOS wants you to forget that files even exist.

Smartphones already have: gps, bluetooth, wifi, 3g, accelerometers, compasses, gyroscopes, sd storage, hd displays, opengl, lots of RAM, more than 16gb storage, etc. What more could you add to them?? They are almost a PC, so why not use them as a PC that already has the capacity to fulfill most casual users needs.

On the cost issue, for WP8 or BB10 to take the market, they need to learn a lesson from cheap android phones and cheap S40 phones, that cover most of the needs of its users while remaining affordable, and even sometimes having more battery. If they don't come up with sub $100 devices (with subsidy), they are simply not going to penetrate latin america and india.

Apple is kicking who's ass, exactly?

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-US-monthly-201112-201212

Given that Android isn't even on that list, and the highest bar is Windows 7, am I to assume you're telling me Apple is losing share to Windows 7 and Windows XP smartphones? Or is this a deflection to talk about computer marketshare which isn't the original topic.

Apple is kicking who's ass, exactly?

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-US-monthly-201112-201212

Apple sells iPhones outside of the US. What is their global marketshare?

This map may be of interest; mouse-over each country to see the breakdown. Of course, it's web usage stats not sales, so you can probably expect android to be a bit higher than reported as its market share has been increasing. But still, the geographical distribution is fascinating.

Wait, what?

Does that orange line look like "declining" to you?. And Win8 is lumped together with "Others" at 3%.

Dude, I can see you're an MS zealot from your posts history, but at least try bullshitting about something less easily verifiable.

OEM buys the licenses beforehand.

All MS has to do is say "Ok, instead of having 1 months supply of Windows 8 licenses I need you to buy 5 months ahead of time!"

Then MS releases a press release saying "OMG DEMAND FOR WINDOWS 8 WENT UP 500%!" Intentionally, exgerated of course but that is my point. We all know the accounting tricks of Vista numbers where people and businesses bought them but wiped them and downgraded to XP.

Online website counters are the real way to predict adoption. If anyone is interested in the real number of people *actually using* windows 8 click here from statcounter who checks millions of websites each day? Windows 8 was 2% the last I looked. In comparison Windows 7 jumped 3x more in the same time period 3 years ago!

In otherwords it is a dud.

Wouldn't it be just easier to use no prefixes and have it magically work on all browsers?

If they're competent developers worth their salt, they'll list the nonstandard prefixes first, followed by the standard supported so things degrade gracefully. Its not like management likes to spend more money than they have to on things, even if it means brittle software. Done in by their own greed? Web development is further from traditional software development than closer and the quality variations attest to the low barriers to entry.

THe point of the story was how great it would be if Webkit owned a HUGE part of the market and how MS will benefit and how webmasters would be happy

How great is it is where we are presently at. It's not about developers being happy, it's about users. Without users buying these products/using software with rich features (because there is a market for them) there wouldn't be services offered for them. Why do users use it (Safari, Chrome)? Because it does what they want (in most cases) better than the competition. Competition is great for the end user because better products are created. Competition is what stopped the cluster fuck from the last decade which Microsoft is still playing catch-up on. Until they've got one of the top 3 positions with their latest browser wouldn't you agree that they're still playing catch up?

Perhaps the reason people use webkit is because it is what comes with their tablets and phones and works everyone? Not because they love it.

I made no claims about love, simply choice. Mobile phones are not bastions of choice, they're the exact opposite of general purpose computers, apples to oranges. Microsoft is late to the party and as such must make extra effort to woo people from entrenched players. Additionally there aren't any 3rd party browser choices on Microsofts platform either. Perhaps if they had moved faster they would've be like BSD to Linux. Your comment ignores the larger desktop market which presently still offers more flexibility software wise. For the sake of argument let's look at Statcounter metrics. Mobile platform market share in the US is split between iPhone and Android. Mobile browser market share lists Safari, Android Browser, and Opera Mini as the top 3 showing how much of an outlier these alternative browsers really are and should illuminate developers and clients support priorities. Most of the companies I've been at, ~10% or less of the market and management decrees we don't make a concerted effort, it's great if it does, but it's not a priority. We're not alone in this either.

So my point is to learn from your mistakes. Not repeat them and the more engines and adherence to a uniform way of functioning the better.

Even better, learn from the mistakes of others. The mistakes you're referring to should be attributed to the web developers, not the vendors, as the browsers support standards. Much like the situation where shoddily programmed applications require administrator rights to function and Microsoft incorrectly getting the ire of users when the developers are at fault for failing to follow proper coding conventions. Tools (markup) when wielded properly with experience and skill enable great things.

Wouldn't it be just easier to use no prefixes and have it magically work on all browsers?

If they're competent developers worth their salt, they'll list the nonstandard prefixes first, followed by the standard supported so things degrade gracefully. Its not like management likes to spend more money than they have to on things, even if it means brittle software. Done in by their own greed? Web development is further from traditional software development than closer and the quality variations attest to the low barriers to entry.

THe point of the story was how great it would be if Webkit owned a HUGE part of the market and how MS will benefit and how webmasters would be happy

How great is it is where we are presently at. It's not about developers being happy, it's about users. Without users buying these products/using software with rich features (because there is a market for them) there wouldn't be services offered for them. Why do users use it (Safari, Chrome)? Because it does what they want (in most cases) better than the competition. Competition is great for the end user because better products are created. Competition is what stopped the cluster fuck from the last decade which Microsoft is still playing catch-up on. Until they've got one of the top 3 positions with their latest browser wouldn't you agree that they're still playing catch up?

Perhaps the reason people use webkit is because it is what comes with their tablets and phones and works everyone? Not because they love it.

I made no claims about love, simply choice. Mobile phones are not bastions of choice, they're the exact opposite of general purpose computers, apples to oranges. Microsoft is late to the party and as such must make extra effort to woo people from entrenched players. Additionally there aren't any 3rd party browser choices on Microsofts platform either. Perhaps if they had moved faster they would've be like BSD to Linux. Your comment ignores the larger desktop market which presently still offers more flexibility software wise. For the sake of argument let's look at Statcounter metrics. Mobile platform market share in the US is split between iPhone and Android. Mobile browser market share lists Safari, Android Browser, and Opera Mini as the top 3 showing how much of an outlier these alternative browsers really are and should illuminate developers and clients support priorities. Most of the companies I've been at, ~10% or less of the market and management decrees we don't make a concerted effort, it's great if it does, but it's not a priority. We're not alone in this either.

So my point is to learn from your mistakes. Not repeat them and the more engines and adherence to a uniform way of functioning the better.

Even better, learn from the mistakes of others. The mistakes you're referring to should be attributed to the web developers, not the vendors, as the browsers support standards. Much like the situation where shoddily programmed applications require administrator rights to function and Microsoft incorrectly getting the ire of users when the developers are at fault for failing to follow proper coding conventions. Tools (markup) when wielded properly with experience and skill enable great things.

The name "Ubuntu" has its roots in Africa, but I fail to see how either Canonical or indeed any significant part of Ubuntu has their origins there. Despite how people have talked about how Linux would be a good fit for poor countries, market share in Africa has been way lower than in the rest of the world, ranging from 0.2% in 2008 to 0.5-0.6% today - download as CSV for the numbers. Pretty much all the drive in the OSS community has come from high-bandwidth countries where downloading hundreds of megabytes of distros/patches/source code has been relatively easy. I doubt it's much of a coincidence Linus started his work at the University of Helsinki, probably one of the only fat pipes in the country at the time. So they're "abandoning" a market they never had in the first place.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201111-201211

It does depend on who you ask:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201111-201211
Android = 31.7%
iOS = 23.7%

Sort of shows up how useless these website-based stat trackers actually are, considering how widely they vary.

Still, these figures do show up an effect a sibling poster mentioned- iOS users do seem to use the web more than their market share would suggest.

Huh? Microsoft themselves has already admitted that Windows 8 sales are at nearly the EXACT same pace as Windows 7 sales

No, what was said is that Windows 8 sales are in line with Windows 7. We can look at the historical figures to see how Win7 sold; over the course of its lifetime Windows 7 sold on average a pretty flat 20M licenses a month. In the first few months of release it sold an average of 26M licenses a month; during its first 70 days on sale, MS Win7 sold 60M licenses. If they sold 40M in the first 30 days, that leaves only 20M units to sell over the next 40 days including the Christmas season and Black Friday. Selling at this rate (15M a month) is well below what Win7 sold during the rest of its lifetime (20M). The numbers don’t just make sense.

However, what does make sense is that current sales of Win8 are in line with Win7. As I’ll show later, current market share growth of Win8 as measured by statcounter is, in fact, in line with Win7.

Okay... How about actual web usage

Sure, let’s take a closer look though, instead of just reporting a simple difference and calling it a day. Foremost, if you take a look at the actual data, Win8 is growing much differently than Win7 did when it was first released. While Win7 market share grew linearly after launch, Win8 is growing either quadratically, or at least has hit an inflection point and will continue linear growth that about matches (or slightly exceeds) Win7.

Take a look at these figures, derived from worldwide statcounter data. (Statcounter doesn’t publish Win8 data on its own yet, but did so for the period of 10/1 – 11/28 here. To get Win8 stats outside this range, I took the average ‘Linux’ and ‘Other’ (both of which have no growth; average daily change for Linux is .0002, and .002 for Other) percent share from the linked data, and subtract that from the current ‘Other’ data, and what’s left is a good estimate of Win8 share.)

The first chart shows the market share of Win8 over the past 14 days (11/1912-12/2/12), and Win7 over the comparable 14 day period in 2009 (11/15/09 – 11/28/09). If you fit a line to this data, you can see that Win8 is growing at a rate comparable (actually a bit faster) to Win7. The second image shows growth of Win7 over the first quarter of availability, and Growth of Win8 until today. The chart also contains two Win8 growth projections: quadratic (fitted to all the data) and linear (fitted to the past two weeks of data). Even though the quadratic curve is a better fit, the linear projection is probably more likely to pan out and shows Win7-like growth. Either way, what’s clear is that Win8 is not growing the same way Win7 did (linear right out of the gate). There was either a slow start and its growing linearly now, or it’s growing quadratically.

Finally in the figure, I have a comparison of percent growth since launch. You keep making reference that Win8 is behind Win7 in absolute terms, but you are not revealing that Win7 started at a much higher percentage than Win8: 2.21% vs. 0.38%. Even Vista started at a high percentage, at 0.6% according to your w3sch

Where do those stats came from and how old are they?

Latest stats from two well-known sources show quite different numbers:

NetApplications - North America + Europe:
Win7 43%
WinXP 21%
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10&qpaf=-000%09100%090%0DO000%09100%091%0D

Statcounter - WORLDWIDE
Win7 53%
WinXP 26%
Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201111-201211

Actually Elop sold his shares and Ballmer doesn't even seem to be in the top 5 individual owners. Only 10% of the stock is owned by insiders, the rest being owned by institutional investors. So it seems that either Microsoft is defrauding everyone including the largest institutional investors in the US, or the Licenses Sold metric is a valid way to measure the pace of sales.

Of course, Microsoft has their own spin on the numbers, but if you take the Vista "Licenses Sold" statistics and put them into context with similar statistics reported by Microsoft for other OSes, you can tell the Vista numbers reported at the time were too low to indicate the OS was growing at an acceptable rate. For instance, consider the following chart, which shows reported sales data from Microsoft for W95 - W7, and projections for W8, based on historical trends. You can easily tell that even with all the double counting, Vista sales are far below what you would expect for an OS that is selling well, such as XP or W7. To me, this says the effect of the double counting from upgrades is negligible compared to the sheer volume of regular license sales that make it to end users.

To check the reasonableness of this, take a look at this data in the chart for W7 sales, compared to actual growth reported by market share trackers like statcounter. The linked chart shows relatively linear (R^2 = .99) monotonic growth of Windows 7 after launch, implying a constant per month rate of sales. The Windows 7 "Licenses Sold" data from Microsoft in my chart shows Windows 7 sold on average 20.10 +- 2.2 Million units per month over the course of 36 months.

So to check to see how the "licenses sold" number reflects real adoption of the OS, we could probably look at the ratio of the rates of sales for Vista and W7 in both units sold and marketshare gain. We would expect, that if licenses sold translates to marketshare gain, then these ratios should be the same.

From the statcounter figures, in the period where Vista was on sale but before W7 was released, it gains marketshare at about .61 percentage points per month. Windows 7, after its release, gained market share at about 1.4 percentage points per month, for a ratio of 2.3. The same ratio for average "Licenses Sold" data is 20.01M/9.54M over the same period (12/2008 - 09/2009 for Vista, 12/2009 - 10/2012 for W7), for a ratio of 2.1. That means that either Microsoft understated Windws 7 Licenses Sold by 6.05%, or the overstated Windows Vista licenses by 5.71%, or some combination thereof.... and factor in Piracy which would not count as license sold.

Anyway, the point is that from past data released by Microsoft for "Licenses Sold" and actual data representing actual OS market share growth, the Licenses Sold metric is very nearly identical to and indicative of growth of the OS.

Is Munich full of Jews or something?

Note that in Israel, people use more than 90% Windows and negligible amount of Linux. Given that there's probably no place with a higher percentage of Jews than Israel, clearly Windows is the favourite operating system of Jews. Not that it matters.

And don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee, you cocksmoking teabaggers!

"Teabaggers" refers to Tea Party movement members. Those are the far right wing of the US. Given that even the US left wing is right wing from European view, but Munich is governed by Social Democrats, i.e. left wing from European view, I'd say they are as far from being Teabaggers as they can be (OK, not really; "Die Linke" would be even more left-wing, as the name already tells: It is German for "The Left"). You are so completely off, that's not even funny. Could you not at least have taken the "communist" stereotype?

But maybe it's just that you lack miR-941 :-)

Chrome surpassed IE in May of this year with 32.43% share versus IE's 32.12%, and for the month of October they show Chrome with just over a 2.5 point lead. This is according to StatCounter. They don't break down different versions of browsers, however, so I'm sure that the IE6 numbers are rolled in with the newer versions.

It's been a long time since anybody could legitimately blame Microsoft for standards compliance in IE.

I'm not sure how you're able to say that with a straight face. I'm pretty sure you don't do any form of web development otherwise you'd be aware of the coddling IE requires to achieve what many other browsers do "out of the box".

In no particular order here are some things that are encountered in the real world, and not "edge cases":
IE9 border radius + gradient hack.
Having to use a filter (directx!) to achieve effects like other browsers.
Up until IE10 limited or no support of CSS transitions and animations. Browser comparison
SVG animations.
Missing CSS3 selectors. If you really want to delve into things IE8, which is arguably the most popular IE version out there, is a worse offender than IE9.

Interesting numbers. Statcounter, however, seems to disagree with them considerably, showing Android leading by a significant margin. Not sure what to make of that exactly, but it's pretty clear that "Fact is most Android phones are the low-price, low-margin variety that are used almost exclusively for texting" probably isn't completely true.

Plus the "low-price, low-margin" market is starting to include the high end. The Nexus 4 is aiming at a $400 price point. Huawei and ZTE have been releasing phones that are not that far off from the high end Samsungs and HTC's with an A$350 price point for over 2 years now (the 2010 Huawei Ideos X5 was the same spec as the 2010 HTC desire but released 3 months later at half the price).

Plus, if you don't feel like paying A$700 for a high end Android phone at release you wait 3 months and get it for A$450. I bought my GNex for A$350 a few months after release. With Apple, if you don't feel like paying A$900 at release, you wait 6 months and still pay A$900. At this point you can safely assume Apple is gouging it's customers.

Basically, high cost are not keeping high end phone prices high. This is being reflected on Android but not on IOS.

Interesting numbers. Statcounter, however, seems to disagree with them considerably, showing Android leading by a significant margin. Not sure what to make of that exactly, but it's pretty clear that "Fact is most Android phones are the low-price, low-margin variety that are used almost exclusively for texting" probably isn't completely true.

October 2008 - October 2009 IE had 61.67% of the worldwide share compared with 35.14% in the past year. Compared with 62.84% in the US down to 43.4%. (And compared with 85-95% of the market in the early 2000s)

Also, each proceeding version is less popular than the last starting with 6.

And the w3schools shows IE with a high of 88% in March 2003, and October 2012, it had 16.1%.

GP greatly exaggerated IE's demise, but it's not faring well.

October 2008 - October 2009 IE had 61.67% of the worldwide share compared with 35.14% in the past year. Compared with 62.84% in the US down to 43.4%. (And compared with 85-95% of the market in the early 2000s)

Also, each proceeding version is less popular than the last starting with 6.

And the w3schools shows IE with a high of 88% in March 2003, and October 2012, it had 16.1%.

GP greatly exaggerated IE's demise, but it's not faring well.

October 2008 - October 2009 IE had 61.67% of the worldwide share compared with 35.14% in the past year. Compared with 62.84% in the US down to 43.4%. (And compared with 85-95% of the market in the early 2000s)

Also, each proceeding version is less popular than the last starting with 6.

And the w3schools shows IE with a high of 88% in March 2003, and October 2012, it had 16.1%.

GP greatly exaggerated IE's demise, but it's not faring well.

I can tell you pretty much ONLY the SMBs use IE anymore around here and even many of them are moving away from IE

Statcounter Top 5 Browsers

Worldwide
USA

Net Applications

Desktop Browser Market Share

Statcounter and Net Applications are in agreement that the IE browser remains a strong global competitor on the laptop/desktop. Net Applications draws its stats from sites which have deep penetration into the mass consumer market.

[FYI: Net Applications posts a .41% share for Windows 8 and a 1% share for Linux. Not too shabby for an OS the geek claims no one is using.]

w3schools

Browser Statistics

Note: W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

Tip: Global averages may not be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old computers.

I can tell you pretty much ONLY the SMBs use IE anymore around here and even many of them are moving away from IE

Statcounter Top 5 Browsers

Worldwide
USA

Net Applications

Desktop Browser Market Share

Statcounter and Net Applications are in agreement that the IE browser remains a strong global competitor on the laptop/desktop. Net Applications draws its stats from sites which have deep penetration into the mass consumer market.

[FYI: Net Applications posts a .41% share for Windows 8 and a 1% share for Linux. Not too shabby for an OS the geek claims no one is using.]

w3schools

Browser Statistics

Note: W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

Tip: Global averages may not be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old computers.

Wrong. There are still hundreds of millions of users with perfectly good computers that are running XP. They don't want to upgrade and migrate all their data and settings. They don't want to pay for new software that will let them do the things they do already. Hell, the feature touted in the thread summary (stereoscopic rendering) is already on Windows XP in OpenGL (and has been forever, including lots of effects that Microsoft forced you to get Vista for). Requiring an OS upgrade for simple features has nothing to do with technology (since OpenGL has no problem) - it is all about bilking you for more money.

According to StatCounter XP usage is now tying MacOSX and Vista usage! Look under United States and add November statistics to do the calculation?

XP is a security nightmare. THe only place where XP and IE 6 are huge is CHina. Outside of that market it is dying. It is time to move on and stop fearing change. XP security is really bad just like IE 6 which came with it as the grandparent stated was from a different era where a good password is all you needed and oh stay out of websites you do not know etc.

Today, you get hacked by just having flash out of date or java installed through an infected ad network. I setup a new install of WIndows 7 just the other day and someone hit the blue E and BAM msn.com had an ad. Had to re-image the damn thing. XP lacks ASLR, DEP (except on a few services), and heap-spray protection. ASLR = random address layering (out of order). All you need to do to hack an XP box is know which ram addresses core dll files use. You can do this as a regular user.

Just insert some code by overflowing a buffer or integer in XP and BAM your code is running as admin, even if the code started as a regular user. Dep and ASLR with Windows 7 can stop this. VC10 has bounds checking when a program crashes to prevent loss of control ... again does not work on XP. XP does not seperate processes and priveldges and even impersonates administrator and hardware devices ... wow.

XP
- can't scale beyond 2 cores efficiently
- SATA driver can't multitask with command queing
- Swaps like a mofo due to a terrible paging algorithm (double pennalty if you use the default SATA driver) even if you have plenty of ram
- Slower and shitty graphics due to not supporting WDDM and a compuser below DirectX11 and the hardware. This makes your computer more stable
- Driver BSOD protection
- No UEFI support
- No Trim SSD Support
- No modern browser support after 2014 (Chrome and FF will drop it)

I assume if you work in IT (like most slashdotters) that you are under 30 and are used to behavior that dictates run unupdated ancient platforms but DO NOT TOUCH IT. THose of use over 35 remember doing it every 2- 3 years like your phones.

It is irresponsible and dangerous to run XP today and especially after next year. It is time to move on my friend. It is 2012 now. Your PC is not an appliance like a fridge if it is internet enabled. We wont support you anymore and it wont be our problem for not supporting IE 6- 8 and XP. That problem is yours.