Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Claims a Billion Windows Installs by End of 2008
eldavojohn writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed yesterday that there will be a billion machines running Windows within a year. 'The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion. If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept.'"
They are the McDonald's of software
Indeed.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
How is this possible? Do that many people even have access to a computer?
Let me see... I had to reinstall Windows 12 times on my son's computer, 8 times on my Wife's computer, 5 times on my computer at work, 15 times on my dad's computer, and so on....
Yeah, I can see how Microsoft can claim 1 billion installs - let's see them filter it out to "unique computers" and see where that number goes.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Not sure why that's so mind-numbing. I personally own more computers than I do cars, and I have my laptop from work. Two out of my three machines are Windows.
I'm sure most of us work in environments where computers outnumber people. And, I'm sure the back-room infrastructure of most IT departments consists of a fair number of machines doing various things. (And, any sufficiently large organization is gonna have at least one IT department/location.) Hell, I bet Microsoft and Google combined have several hundred thousand machines if not more.
Now, I have no idea of how they estimated this 1 billion machines, but I don't find it a surprising number at all -- I bet my office of 50 people has well over 100 computers running Windows, and we're one office in a multi-national corporation.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Add number of instance licenses sold
to maximum population estimates of site license holders
to the highest out-of-thin-air web or internally reported estimate of unlicensed instances
add the results of rolling some chicken bones
Repeat until your number sounds psychologically significant.
But all that's ok. McDonalds still has them beat in the meaningless BS accounting department. They gave up at "Billions and Billions Served" though you can occasionally find one with a number in front of the billions. All things considered, i'd rather have the big mac than windows.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
There's a lot of good stuff in Windows, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. Sure, we know that Linux has a better networking stack now, but, there have been things that Windows does better than Linux and will be so in the future.
:-)
a) Windows XP remote desktop is easier to deal with than X remoting.
b) Both KDE and Gnome borrow u/i design heavily from the Windows 95 Start Bar. The concept of COM based shell extensions was looted by KParts.
c) Cairo is essentially a GDI+ me too.
d) There's still nothing in Unix that has the same handy role as a Graphics Device Context.
e) Although I prefer OpenGL for its ease of entry, a lot of big gaming houses seem to prefer DirectX.
f) For a long time, Windows lead in hardware discovery. Linux has closed that gap, I think, but in 1995, I was editing config files to get my X to work with my monitor, and Windows would discover both for me automatically.
g) It's -STILL- easier to install a new piece of software on Windows. Too easy, the security people will refrain...
And, in the applications department, there's really no open source offering that comes remotely close to Visual Studio 2005 and C#, SQL Server 2005, and certainly not even Office 2000, let alone newer versions of Office. Sure, OpenOffice word processing is ok, but the spreadsheet is crap, and the "Access" clone is terrible. On the other hand, C++ for Linux has I think pulled ahead of what MS offers, but only really because MS is standing still in C++. If they got pissed off enough, they'd throw a billion dollars into the language and crush us.
The bottom line is, while you and I and many other people like Linux better than Windows, Windows IS a good product, and pretending that its not won't change it. What will change it,is more software for Linux.
Get typing.
This is my sig.
"more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles"
Why is this supposed to be surprising? A lot of people don't have cars.
There are peoples in cities, who have taxis, buses, subways, trains, carpooling, bikes, legs, etc.
There are people in the countryside, farms etc, who may not have need of a car because they walk or use animals on their land.
There are teens and college students everywhere who are likely to have a computer and not yet have a vehicle.
If anything, that car analogy makes the numbers seem a lot less staggering.
"if only i had known i would have been a locksmith." -albert einstein
Windows NT Crashes, Leaving U.S.S. Yorktown Dead in the Water
Ha!
Not to mention the fact that he complains about having to manually configure X for his monitor in 1995.
Badass Resumes
Huh? What have you been smoking? May I have some of it?
Would you care to state why you think he's so wrong rather than making ad hominem attacks?
I like Linux a lot -- I use it as my primary development environment at work, even -- but I have to agree that, despite any other problems it may have, XP's remote desktop is much easier to use than forwarding X connections. Under Linux I have to start up an SSH connection to another computer, enable X forwarding, then figure out the command line to execute whatever GUI I'm interested in. If you actually want to use your desktop environment on that computer, you'll get to jump through some other hoops to make it play nicely with your desktop on your current computer. In XP, you just establish a remote desktop connection to whatever computer you're interested in, and poof, you're connected with full GUI access.
You can accomplish something similar in Linux with VNC, but that doesn't actually let you log in to a new session, you just take control of an existing X session. It's also much more bandwidth intensive than XP's RDP; you can use RDP over even a dial-up connection. VNC is an exercise in patience and watching windows redraw.
X has its advantages, but easier? No, sir, what are you smoking?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Actually, the reason why Microsoft is showing such an inflated number of installs is people are buying OEM Vista machines, getting fed the fuck up with the OS, and going out and buying a copy of XP, so MS can double-dip their figures.
1 billion installs isn't that much, especially considering that they're probably including numbers from Windows 386 or DOS forward. It just means that some random guy reinstalled so many times that they're counting 1 billion installs.
Is my food tasty, troll?
+5, Truth
Not just OEM Vista, they are surely including OEM installs of every version of Windows. I own Windows 98 four times over despite the fact that I never wanted or even used it, Windows 95 three times, XP Pro once, and XP Home four times.