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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.'"
The chart occasionally shows Firefox having more hits than IE. Maybe those months had more /. articles pointing to PC World's website?
[T]hat'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.
That may not happen very quickly: at least one developer I know is under orders to write only things that work under XP, and test them with Vista for compatibility. Anything that's Vista-only is explicitly forbidden, because Vista uptake has been so slow.
Economically speaking, if Vista can run XP programs, your market for writing something that runs on both is vastly larger than your market for writing something that only runs on Vista. If you sold software for money, would you write anything Vista-only?
Vista has a ridiculously large footprint. I've seen systems with 2GB of RAM and fairly decent processor (Athlon 64 x2 4200) run Vista and it's sllllooowwww. Much slower than XP on the system.
OTOH, give Mac OS X Leopard or Ubuntu Gutsy that much RAM and CPU and watch it sing.
Sorry for anyone who feels like Vista is great, but facts are facts. Vista is slow and bloated.
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You know, when Windows XP came out, it was fairly slow and bloated. So was Windows 98. It wasn't the software, it was the available hardware. (Not that I'm defending Vista. I can't stand Vista. I've tried it twice now, the first for a month and just last month for two weeks with a new beta SP1. Nasty.)
I don't know if Vista is redeemable. I'm going to have to wait at least until SP2 before I want to try again.
That should be by late 2009. So, imagine double the processor power, with an 8 core processor, a solid state disk and at least 64 gig of RAM. If Microsoft gets their butts in gear and start listening to their customers, SP2 might be something worthwhile. We shall see how it works out.
Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.
Close. Vista is preinstalled on less new machines now than when it was first introduced. First there was the big shiny "Vista for All" unveiling, then vendors started trying to get business by offering "Downgrade to WinXP available here!" and being successful at it.
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I'd love to see statistics showing the number of Vista purchases vs. Vista usage. I started my job about a year ago and we had around 10 machines purchased before I took over purchasing and they had Vista. Once I had time, I replaced them all with Windows XP -- I didn't bother trying to get replacements from our vendor, it was easier/quicker just to buy XP Pro outright from an OEM supplier. I know I'm not the only one that's replaced Vistas with XP.
What percentage of Vista sales aren't permanent users?
IE6 (all operating systems) 35.22%
FF (all operating systems and versions) 18.35%
IE7 (all OS) 18.15%
Other.. the rest
May I ask what "the rest" is, being that it's about 29% of your numbers? I would guess that Safari, IE5, and Opera are probably at about 5% combined, so that leaves a bit to be accounted for.
I wish I had mod points to up your funny score... For years in the late 80's and early 90's, I was dumb enough to call Microsoft customer support on occasion. It was a 100% waste of time, a truly unbelievable record of failed customer support. Then I discovered that the Dell customer support guys knew practically everything about Windows and it's popular applications, and they'd answer just about any technical question you had. I suspect they did more Microsoft support than Dell hardware support. All that ended when Dell fired their US based support staff and off-shored support to India. Now days, I just run Ubuntu. If I need support, I just use Google. I'm sure Windows users are also quite helpful on the web, but I have to say I absolutely love the community support hovering around Ubuntu.
I suspect that Vista may be the result of Microsoft's aging. In the 90's, when the core of XP was built (NT back then - I was a big fan), Microsoft was growing at an insane pace. Much of the best talent (the kind Google gets now days) went to Microsoft. With that kind of success, XP was a natural result. With the web bust, and with the best talent often going elsewhere, and with Bill Gates effectively retired, Vista may be the natural result. I'm not sure I'd hold my breath waiting for Vista to become as good as XP.
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