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PCWorld Says Firefox is Strong, Vista is Weak
twitter writes "PC World has released their year in review statistics and 2007 was not kind to Microsoft. IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 and no one wants Vista. 'How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far.'"
Wouldn't the number of people using Macs be lower than average, since they were measuring visitors to a PC-centric website?
Assuming the summary is correct...
They're comparing usage based on visits to their website. Not only that, but they're comparing uptake of Vista in 2007 to XP in 2001. As a percentage.
I can't help but feel that a lot has changed over that time to make that method of comparison completely irrelevant, both in terms of MS's operations (like how Vista follows a fairly strong OS that has had years to take root, compared with XP, which followed Windows Me, which sucked in every possible way) and in terms of the overall PC market (like how Macs are much more competitive, and how Linux has matured, but mostly how so many hardware and software has been developed for Windows XP).
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The same BLOG linked to also states that ie7 is in use more than firefox. However, the tagline for the slashdot story says "firefox is strong". In the time it has come out, more people have adopted that single version of internet explorer than are using all versions of firefox combined.
Only on slashdot folks.
twitter also has another journal entry there, which is hilarious if not for the fact that he spends so much time arguing that Dvorak is an idiot when he says something about Linux twitter doesn't like.
For someone who has already ruined two Slashdot accounts with his misguided "evangelism" and is down to trolling AC, he sure has a lot of fun trolling the site.
twitter, please stop "helping" us. Free software needs people who can make intelligent arguments about why it is superior to closed-source gunk, not trolls who spend all their waking hours making up shit about Microsoft with liberal doses of infantile creative spelling.
According to this web site (http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62034821,00.htm), Vista, in less than one year, has many times the desktop penetration as does Linux (all flavors still constitute less than 1%) after 15 years. The article also mentions that many (most?) businesses are waiting for SP1 before even considering adoption. Given that SP1 is due in a month or so, I strongly suspect there will be a dramatic change in Vista's numbers in its second year of existence.
Also along these lines, I know quite a few people who are getting Vista on their new home machines, and have been, for the most part, favorably impressed. This, over time, will also translate into increased adoption in the business world. Like it or not, Vista will become the pervasive desktop in the next 2 years.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
"... MS gets most of the bugs ironed out it'll be OK for every Windows user..."
I fixed that for you. Windows users are not everyone.
You don't find that Vista is a sluggish piece of crap? With 2GB of RAM, a damn fast Core 2 Duo, and a 256MB G70 video card, I find the interface chugs along after installing a few perfectly normal programs. XP is a dream in comparison.
We'd all be decrying the downfall of Microsoft. Does anyone realize how much 14% is? Its huge!
More significant would be the percentage that decide to switch away from Vista within more than a week, but less than a month.
(People who got it on a machine and immediately switched to, say, Linux, shouldn't be counted. I'm after the ones that gave it a reasonable trial.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm just wondering how much of a backlash Vista will have on the open source operating environments.
.NET. This means that most of the operating system, and in short time - the applications - will be managed software. This will mean that, in general, software will indeed be safer to run - e.g. no more buffer overruns. I don't see any movements within the Linux environment towards this direction. Somehow, just playing the NX-bit game doesn't really cut it.
The most different thing about Vista and XP is the off-take of
On the other hand we have the more fine-grained security model. Yes, this means more popup boxes. But if I'm running Ubuntu, it's much worse. I'll have to type my passport so many times that it isn't even funny anymore. Just clicking a popup box seems more user friendly to me.
Not to nag, but even though Vista is a bit of a pain to work with, are we sure we (yes, we, I'm not a Microsoft fan boy, far from it) should keep discrediting Windows? Lets play the technological game and innovate instead. We can do better than MS, both at security, speed, and UI design. Now let's show what we're made off instead of screaming foul.
It's not reasonable to compare how many people are upgrading to Vista from XP. XP is a far better OS than say ME was, so not as many people would want or need to upgrade to Vista. It kinda funny listening to all the yahoos whining about Vista (same as when XP first came out, same as when ME first came out, etc, etc). It's also interesting to hear Apple nuts carrying on about Vista security, when it's been proven that Vista is more secure than Apple. It's especially interesting now that Apple is actually managing to get 10% of the market and the morons who write virus/malware are starting to target Apple. If people would start to understand that a more secure, more sophisticated OS needs better hardware to run as fast as an older less secure system, then it makes sense that Vista will run slower. Yes, Vista will bug you to OK changes (just like most add-on firewall programs do if they are really any good), so what do you want, less security or more speed? You aren't going to get everything and speed, unless of couse you use a more powerful computer to run it. I've seen many, many customers runnung Vista with no problems (so long as they didn't buy an underpowered system), and yes, Microsoft needs to have a few years to tweak Vista (read fix stuff), but what system doesn't need fixes in the first year. I've heard about Leopard having problems losing files, security flaws showing up, etc. Firefox said they didn't have any bugs and techies were running around telling everybody they should use it, now they have fixed 300 hundred memory leaks with the new beta. Get real people, nothing is perfect! But I'll bet that in a couple years Microsoft will still be the top selling Desktop operating system and it'll be Vista.
The fact that the market forced vendors to begin offering XP as an option after they had shifted support to the new version of Windows is unprecedented.
This would be a pretty strong indicator that the market is not "satisfied that Win XP is good enough for their needs" like the article suggests, but that a significant segment are actively rejecting Vista as a bad product even on a brand new computer.
Which, of course, it is. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall, and they cashed in their chips. Which means, they saw that it was time to sell their install base out to third party interests instead of trying to keep hold of them.
We've all seen situations where the value of a good name is measured in how long it's purchaser can sell substandard goods at high markup before the name isn't good anymore.
That's what this is. The industry decided to back "Trusted Computing" despite it being contrary to the interests of consumers, and no one wants to buy it. That's why the new drivers don't work, why the old software is buggy, etc. The common person doesn't know why, but they know it's not working right, and they don't like it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Just pointing this out as a Linux/Windows/Mac user:
The fact that the newest OSX installs and Linux installs aren't slow on my older machines would be...?
Microsoft designs sluggish, crappy operating systems. The hardware eventually gets to the point that they run ok.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
No, it can't be that Microsoft released a turd sandwich - it must be Slashdot group think! Come on, lets get real here - all the promising features of Longhorn were stripped out of XP's successor and we end up with an OS that adds little in new features but a lot of bloat, DRM, an obtuse UAC and a large performance downgrade.
Microsoft could improve the performance issues with Vista with service packs, but seriously - what does Vista offer over XP, aside from artificial obsolescence like DX 10 being Vista only when it was almost certainly developed on XP?
I'd give you a mod point for that if I had one, because the economic climate does have something to do with it. It's not so much the merits of the OS that matters in this context. It's how many people are buying new PCs.
The American worker hasn't gotten a raise in 6 years. For some, a lot longer. So while it's true that unemployment is low, that doesn't mean much to the PC market if no one has much disposable income.
It's similar to the situation with the PS3, and the other HD "next gen" components. Is the price too high, or is the worker too poor? It's sorta the same thing. The end result is that products don't move as quickly as corporations had hoped.
Of course, I'm not defending Vista. It sucks for all of the reasons mentioned in other comments. Plus, most of the regular users that I talk to about it hate how the interface was needlessly changed... they finally learned how to perform basic tasks on their PCs, and then MS goes and moves everything around. That's the type of thing that drives the ordinary office worker bananas.
I actually think it's a lot easier to go from XP to Ubuntu than from XP to Vista, from the point of view of a typical person.
So yeah, there are tons of factors that contribute to Vista's slow adoption, but if the economy was cooking along in a way that benefited the average person, they'd be down at Best Buy picking up a new PC.
The useful APIs haven't really changed since 2000.. and most of that was due to Active directory. If you're not doing domain authentication it probably won't affect you.
You can use 'new' APIs for stuff but normally it's nothing that couldn't be done with two or three API calls to 'old' APIs.. and any developer will have a library of code that does that anyway so it'd be more work to change it than leave it as it is.
It's unfreakingbelievable to me that you consider it normal for your CPU to idle at 11% usage, whether it's XP or Vista. I know it's not a direct linear translation, but think of it this way: 330MHz of your 3GHz CPU are being wasted all the time. Why anyone settles for this type of mediocrity or accepts it as normal is beyond me.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
I'd hardly say that qualifies as nobody wanting Vista. But either way, I've been around long enough to expect Twitter to pull random junk out of his ass. He's pretty much the Devorak/Jack Thompson of Linux advocacy.
Except, possibly more vapid.
Of course IE7 is going to be the most used browser out there. It's preinstalled on Vista, probably preinstalled on a lot of newer XP systems too, and comes heavily hyped by MS as part of Windows Update. I suspect most home PC users with broadband have got it already. The vast majority of computer users have probably never even heard of Firefox or other alternative browsers, much less know how to get and install one. Popularity has never been a good metric for anything.
That said, it's encouraging that Firefox is as popular as it is. Not all of those Firefox users are coming from Linux/BSD people, and most Mac people I know are happy with Safari, so it must be making good inroads in the corporate desktop world or through word of mouth.