Vista Share Drops for the First Time In Two Years

adeelarshad82 writes "Windows Vista lost market share last month for the first time in almost two years, a sign that users are already abandoning the oft-ridiculed operating system in favor of the new Windows 7. According to Web metrics firm Net Applications, Vista dropped 0.2 percentage points during September to end the month at an 18.6% slice of the operating system pie. Windows 7, meanwhile, gained 0.3 percentage points, its biggest one-month gain since Microsoft began handing out the new OS to the public in January 2009. Windows 7 powered an estimated 1.5% of all computers that connected to the Internet last month, also a record."

Comments

Re:Microsoft's done itself a lot of damage lately

[Zumbs]

Not to mention dropping support for old formats. Some of us want to be able to read our old documents without resorting to

The documents I wrote in Wordpad on Windows 95 & 98 could no longer be opened when I upgraded to XP. Neither by Word nor Wordpad. Only Windows product to open them were notepad. OpenOffice, however, had no problem opening them - it even showed the styles correctly.

Vista being a bloated slow buggy pain in the arse that permeates every part of the user experience just takes the cake though. Windows 7 is going to need to shine big time. So far it's looking better than Vista (but for that matter so is a turd sandwich). They can't afford to get it wrong.

I think they can afford it. MS still has a monopoly on providing OSes for home and buisness users, and even a fail like Vista did not make a dent into that monopoly. Another fail might, but I'm not so sure.

Vista got some really undeserved looks.

[MrCrassic]

When I used it, it really wasn't that bad. I'll grant that UAC was most definitely annoying and in its infancy, but other than that, it was pretty stable for the time I used it. The only services which affected stability were the Desktop Search and DWM, which is often impacted directly by the quality of the video drivers driving it.

Lots of people gave Vista a bad rep because -- get this -- they didn't know how to use their damned computers! Projector not working? No, it can't possibly be that you forgot to hit Fn+F8; IT MUST BE VISTA! Stuff running slow? It's certainly not that a GAZILLION processes are running at the same time, along with the spyware you've accumulated from using IE to surf for porn and free stuff; IT MUST BE VISTA! While a lot of the Mac vs PC commercials that Apple ran dealt a lot with the usability differences, in reality, a prime reason FOR those issues in usability is because lots of users don't know how to actually use them properly.

I've been running Windows 7 for quite some time now, and it has definitely eliminated the need for Windows Server 2008 or Windows XP running on any of my systems (except the legacy servers that I have, which both run Server 2003...but will be upgrading!) The killer features for me are the new tricks in Aero (the maximize and minimize features are solid) and the refinements done in wireless networking (which finally feel as integrated as wired has been since forever). Despite these, Vista was the pillar which helped set this up. Without it, we'd still be stuck in Longhorn-land (I'm talking about the Longhorn BEFORE the big codebase swap, which was more or less XP with some bells and whistles).

Re:They CAN'T afford to get it wrong

[b4dc0d3r]

They've made a multi billion dollar business stuffing up Windows. They learned from Vista, but if you look at Windows 7 compared to Vista the biggest difference is that Vista drivers work in 7. That alone explains most of the instability and usability problems Vista had when it first got crapped out. A few more bug fixes for obvious issues and 7 launch will go smoothly, and you won't have the widespread fear-mongering everywhere. Poof, crap turns into a crap sandwich and people happily throw it down their gullets, thinking this time will be better.

The next version is always better.

Re:Not even October 22 yet...

[Macthorpe]

I don't know about the GP, but I put up with that 'crap' because I've spent more time trying to get various Linux distributions to actually work properly* on my computer than I have sorting out activation issues since WGA was introduced. As always, of course, YMMV.

*I count 'works properly' to include things like "detects my keyboard" and "doesn't run like treacle".