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Windows 7 Share Grows At XP's Expense
CWmike writes "Microsoft's Windows ran to stay in place last month as Window 7's market share gains made up for the largest-ever declines in Windows XP and Vista, data released today by Web metrics firm Net Applications showed. By these numbers, Windows 7's gains were primarily at the expense of Windows XP. For each copy of Vista replaced by Windows 7 during November, more than six copies of XP were swapped out. Meanwhile, Apple's Mac OS X lost share during November... betcha Ballmer is having an extra giddy time with that news. Linux came up a winner last month, returning to the 1% share mark for the first time since July. Linux's all-time high in Net Applications' rankings was May 2009, when it nearly reached 1.2%."
I wonder how many of those are people who bought Windows 7 and how many are just people who bought a computer that came with Windows 7?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Certainly how is it bad news for microsoft? It's just saying that people are upgrading from XP to 7
Exactly. Windows 7 is good enough to keep me using Windows if I buy another Windows machine. I was running the RC on my old Thinkpad and it actually had decent performance. Unfortunately, I reinstalled Win XP and, well, I don't care what anyone claims, XP is still faster on older hardware (and yes, I turned off all the eye-candy stuff on the thinkpad). However, if I bought a new machine today and it came with 7, I'd keep it, unlike Vista.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Not true. With 7 we deploy patches, programs, policies, you name it via our Active directory with one click. We Linux is not so easy, and believe it or not, time IS money.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Why is this being reported as some kind of loss for Microsoft? Isn't this *exactly* what they wanted? XP users who didn't switch to Vista to switch to 7?
And what we got with 7? Are YOU kidding or are you just one of those fanboys that don't ever botter to see beyond the pretty interface of a OS?:
Much better Active directory integration
Accessibility improvements. Microsoft has revamped the accessibility features in Windows 7 with improved speech recognition and a new Magnifier utility with full-screen and lens-mode views.
Action Center. While previous versions of Windows included a feature called Windows Security Center that monitored the various security features of the system, Windows 7 takes this functionality to the next level with Action Center. In addition to monitoring security, Action Center also monitors the OS's maintenance features and consolidates alerts from numerous Windows features into a single interface.
Aero Peek. This replacement for Show Desktop in Windows 7 lets you "peek" behind all of the open windows on your desktop and easily view and Windows Gadgets or files on your desktop. You can also peek into the contents of specific open windows.
Aero Snaps. By dragging open windows in certain ways, you can "snap" them to the edges of the screen, maximize, or minimize. This obviates the need to click tiny onscreen elements, making these features more accessible to users.
Backup and Restore. Windows Vista's stellar backup and restore features have been streamlined and simplified in Windows 7. Like its predecessor, Windows 7 supports both data backup and image-based system backup, but now the UIs are more segregated.
Bitlocker To Go. The full-drive encryption feature that first debuted in Windows Vista has been updated in Windows 7 to support removable USB storage devices like flash memory drives and portable hard drives.
Blu-Ray support. Windows 7 natively supports Blu-Ray optical discs and enables you to write to Blu-Ray recordable media.
Device Stage. This Longhorn-style user experience will be made available for multi-function devices such as smart phones, multifunction printers, portable media players, and the like. Through this UI, you'll be able to access the features that are unique to each device. Each Device Stage page can be extensively customized by the device maker.
Devices and Printers. This activity center provides a central location for interacting with any hardware devices--digital cameras, mice, displays, keyboards, and the like--that may be attached to your PC.
DirectAccess. This feature is aimed at business users who need to securely access corporate network resources while away from the office. Essentially a simple replacement for VPN connections, DirectAccess requires Windows Server 2008 R2 on the server-side.
DirectX 11. Windows 7 includes the latest version of the DirectX multimedia libraries.
Display improvements. Windows 7 includes numerous improvements related to computer displays, including integrated display color calibration, improved high DPI support, ClearType, and improved support for external displays. A new Windows Key + P keyboard shortcut helps you easily switch between connected displays.
HomeGroup. Microsoft has consolidated the most common network-based sharing tasks into a single simple interface called HomeGroup. Computers in a HomeGroup can easily share documents, digital media files, and printers over a home network.
Internet Explorer. Windows 7 ships with the latest version of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 8.
Libraries. In Windows 7, Microsoft has realized a long-term goal to replace the static special shell folders from previous Windows versions and replace them with virtualized shell locations that aggregate content from a variety of physical locations. Libraries are implemented as virtual folders and the views
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
You don't understand the power of Active directory policies/software pushing/network structure id you **think** that a repository can do the same. But hey, the happiness of the ignorance is a good thing.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Calling AD software pushing a "repository" is like calling a Ferrari a bike. Sure, both have wheels.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Of course people are upgrading from XP to 7 - if they are upgrading at all. Who upgrades from Debian to Windows? Or, Solaris to Windows?
Oh - 6 XP users upgrade for every Vista user? Surprise, surprise!! Probably half a billion people in this world THOUGH about upgrading to Vista, but decided not to when Vista proved to be such a bomb.
Let's remember, Vista wouldn't run on old equipment, while Win7 runs on anything over a gigahertz with a gig of memory. A lot of XP users COULDN'T upgrade to Vista!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
According to these numbers there are three times more Linux users than iPhone users. The iPhone is generally considered a huge success. Why is Linux percieved so differently?
You obviously have no clue what Active Directory is. There is no equivalent that I've seen in Linux.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Assuming a similar number of people bought a new computer that came with Vista and it took 5 months to reach the same market share as Win7 in 3 weeks, I would say that a good portion of Win7 sales is on upgrades and not new computers.
You can even tell because internally, it calls itself Windows NT 6.1, and Vista is Windows NT 6.0.
The reason they called it Windows 7 was branding. Windows Vista suffered from bad marketing. There were three basic problems:
1) People tried to run it on old, slow systems and it didn't work well. Of course rather than saying "Man, my hardware is too old for a brand new OS, I should upgrade," they blamed the OS for being bad. This was much less of a problem with 7 since there had been 2 years of hardware advances. While dual cores were still a bit of a high end item when Vista hit the market, they are the majority now.
2) 3rd parties had poor driver support. This is pretty much always the rule for when drivers change around. While some companies, notably Intel, AMD and nVidia tend to be extremely on the stick with new drivers, many others bitch and whine and drag their feet. So many systems had problems, printers that wouldn't work or sound cards that were buggy and such. Again, people blamed the OS rather than the companies who made the hardware. Well, most companies have gotten on board now and have their drivers out. Also, Windows 7 didn't change much with regards to driver architecture so most Vista drivers required little to no effort to port. Thus 7 had support for most hardware.
3) There was a highly effective FUD campaign against Vista. A very small part may have been people who were actually maliciously trying to spread misinformation. A larger part were people who simply didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. Peter Gutmann was one of those, he wrote an extremely inaccurate article about what he perceived to be audio DRM in Windows Vista that was, in fact, his soundcard (and drivers) being a piece of crap. However the largest amount was just an echo chamber effect. People heard bad stuff about Vista and repeated it without knowing anything about it. I encountered that all the time, people who would tell me how bad Vista was that had never even seen it running on a system, much less used it. All the time on Slashdot you'd see people espouse the problems with Vista that had never used it, and probalby used XP very little, they were just parroting what they heard. Well this didn't happen with 7.
Thus you have people who crow on about how great 7 is compared to Vista. In some cases, it is people who used Vista and had a bad experience because of an old computer or unsupported hardware, but don't with 7. In other cases, it is people who never used Vista because they were sure it was horrible, but tried 7 and discovered they rather liked the new Windows. They probably would have liked Vista, had they tried it.
So no, there really isn't a major change with 7, just a change in perceptions. It has been refined a bit, for example it works better on systems with 1 gig of RAM whereas Vista really didn't, and 7 seems to be more responsive in the UI (supposedly it has better multithreading of that), but it is a minor refinement. I find that I like 7 because I liked Vista, it is just an improvement on that.
That's likely the whole reason there even was a Windows 7. If not, we'd probalby still be on Vista with a service pack introducing the 7 features like DX11. However they realized that they'd never convince people that Vista was something to try, so they just rebranded it.
Seems to have worked.
Windows 7 Netbooks are selling pretty well, better than XP Netbooks did, and unscientific, anecdotal evidence indicates that a good percentage of PC users (Including laptop owners) are buying Netbooks to add to their "fleet".
It's hard to argue with a $200 price tag.
So Windows 7 is "growing"? Sounds like I should "upgrade" by changing my general.useragent.override sometime soon, all those sites who do not work if you admit GNU/Linux as OS but do work if you are "using" Windows will probably start working great "using" Windows 7 sometime in the near future.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Active Directory is a MS-standard LDAP server. Like OpenLDAP. You can use LDAP to store your users and login to your linux machines using it as the password store.
However, the OP doesn't understand what AD is, as he thinks it pushes software to clients amongst other things (network configuration?). To get those features you need to buy more server software from MS, like WSUS or Systems Centre. There are similar things available for Linux too (eg a repository for updates, Puppet or CFEngine for client configuration and software pushing).
so what your telling me is that the data only tells us how much net traffic windows generates
No. You're misusing the numbers. It shows what proportion of the traffic they monitor, from the sites they monitor, weighted the way they weight it, comes from machines reporting themselves as Windows (or Linux, or BSD, or OS X) computers.
are we to conclude that this is because of market share, or that linux and mac users are actually doing some work
Neither.
it is of course the correlation of the two.
Nope. The data collected is for relative trends, not for overall "net traffic" or for install base market share or for active users or any other actual market.
By using the same methodology consistently, the relative reporting in your sample size can show clues about projections of adoptions of new versions, shifts to other platforms, and other generalized trends. It may indicate relative changes in market share by showing consistent gains or losses over time, and it is weighted in such a way as to approximate market share estimates from other sources, but it is not a projection of any actual market, whether that market is units sold, units in active use, "net traffic", or anything else.
also does this take into account any of the traffic from compromised windows machines?
No effect, unless those "little M$ bonnets" (botnets?) are being directed to open a browser and load one or more of the tracked websites.