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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.'"
Yeah, he's probably right... if you include all the vm's we run to sandbox stuff...
J
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Are they counting pirated copies?
I think that the average household has more Unix systems running for them than Windows. For example - I know for sure that my DVD player and my ADSL modem have Linux running in them. My TV, phones, etc - frankly no idea. Maybe some Unix too, maybe something else. But I heard that this thing runs them most: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project
Yeah, desktop is still important but with things like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC gaining momentum I hope Windows will be further sliding into irrelevancy.
From TFA
4 0206
"The software giant announced it sold 60 million copies of Windows Vista this year, more than the entire installed base of Apple,"
From http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/18
"According to Net Applications, in June Windows Vista accounted for 4.52% of all systems that browsed the Web, up from January's 0.18%. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93% in February, 2.04% in March, 3.02% in April and 3.74% in May. Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22% in January and hit its high point of 6.46% in May, but it slipped back to 6% in June. If Vista's uptake trend continues, it should pass Mac OS X in Web usage share by the end of August."
Are we to believe all these Vista installs are simply not browsing the web?
-- Boycott Shell
To me, none of those things are the hallmark of a good operating system. MS has coded some nice things into their OS on a higher level, but the underlying OS itself is terrible. OpenGL doesn't make an OS. Remote desktop doesn't make an OS. Good APIs, good scheduling, good timesharing, good fault tolerance, good response, good hardware support (ok, Windows has this at least), good networking, good filesystem, good caching strategy, etc... THOSE are the things that make an OS good. Windows might be a good windowing system, but IMO it's a terrible OS because it fails to provide the basics at a really good quality level, with really good performance.
There are lots of PCs out there. I have seen a few '95 and '98 machines still in use (Horrors!).
The aspect that eludes M$ is that of the existing PCs, very few can run Vista. M$ plans to kill off XP next year for new licences, and upgrades of XP soon. Will the world trash hundreds of millions of working PCs, PIII and later? Why would they? The world will find Linux ready to run on them with modern software. It takes a salesman to announce a problem with the M$ empire is an advantage.
Whether it likes it or not, the world will not trash that many working PCs and M$ will have to supply a product for them or drop out. This is not like the good old days when M$ had to persuade folks to shift from 8MHz CPUs to 400MHz CPUs where they could see a real benefit. Nowadays, 3000 MHz CPUs are idling and they want folks to run dual core models that can do 200 frames per second in high resolution to read text.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
With a billion installs, I wonder how many PCs are displaying a BSOD at any given moment in time. Perhaps a million or so?
vnc... though application-level remoting is a charm with X.
KDE is pretty nice sporting loads of features, but not nearly as smooth as win or many commercial desktops.
A straightforward evolution of bitmapped display, not a me too.
This is actually good. Almost all hardware comes with win drivers, but no indication of quality.
Before buying anything I usually do a 'fgrep --invert-match crap
I am sure you never had the experience of installing Team Foundation Server or Sharepoint.
First things first, any clone of 'Access' is most certainly crap, but Access is even worse. Excel is excellent. VS2005 is pretty good, but 2003 was a bugfest. I'd prefer Linux+PostgresQl anytime over a Win+SQLServer2005.
But for now, I like XP best for desktop use.
And yet here you are comparing SQL Server to its competition and declaring it to be `amazing'.