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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%."
Year of the Linux Desktop! Seriously, Windows 7 seems to have answered many of the complaints of Vista. "I'm a PC and designed Windows 7 (by complaining loudly)."
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
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
Yes, 7 is ***cheap*** for education.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
That article was basically a graph in text form.
How on earth do you accurately measure OS installations. I only say because I think the Linux/BSD/other non MS/Apple OSs are probably under represented. For example like a few other people, I stamped an ext{x} shaped boot on the ntfs partition on my computers.
Those computers officially run some sort of Windows but there is no Windows on here but I'm sure my PCs are counted as running Windows by Dell/HP et al.
Sadly - for balance - I can't point at a machine that came with Linux pre installed and had it replaced by Windows.
I'll happily share your excitement, but based on TFA it's only about 16% of the non-MS market.
I mean, the headline makes it sound like Microsoft isn't do so well, but the full summary suggests that Apple is the one lowering its Market share to Linux.
I mean, Considering PC's have the most market share, anyone who doesn't use Windows is essentially using whatever their alternative is (OSX/Linux) to get AWAY from Windows (Especially Vista, that pushed a few people I know towards a Macbook).
So, was Windows 7 expected to Rip all thsoe Happy Mac customers back to Windows? Or was it majestically expected to make Linux users go insane?
Windows Users use Windows, and Windows 7 will only grow from the market share of other Windows operating systems. It'll be a long while before Mac and Linux users go back to Windows, and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse will be just as stumped as I will be.
hey, windows 7 doesn't make me want to throw my laptop out the window (pun intended), nor does it bring up pure hatred and rage from within me like vista did. Big Plus There.
that said, application launch time ARE slower, by a few seconds, compared to XP. especially when opening MS Word or Excel, i'd say more than a few seconds..... NOT a deal breaker, though.
but one thing that gets me about the reviews of windows 7 is the shutdown time. while MY netbook does shutdown quickly, for giggles timed the shutdown times of the atom netbooks at the big box stores. hang on, let me find the times... here we go: 33, 18, 28, 20, 39, and 60 seconds. sure, those are display units subjected to lot's of kids opening ie to check their myspace (only to think the netbooks don't work when the page doesn't come up, due to secured wifi...) but still, using windows 7 certainly doesn't guarantee your machine won't end up with long shutdown times...
For each copy of Vista replaced by Windows 7 during November, more than six copies of XP were swapped out.
Well duh! That's because there are more than six XP users per each Vista user!
/* No Comment */
How?
The NetApp data:
Windows: 92.52%
Mac OS X: 5.12%
Linux (all flavors): 1.00%
Other (including iPhone, Symbian, Java ME): 1.36%
That's 7.48% "non-MS share" on these numbers (and really only non-Windows--it's not apparent whether they count Windows Mobile as "Windows" or as "Other"). Linux, therefore has 13.37% of the "non-MS market". For comparison of the other ones broken out entirely, Apple has 73.26% of that market (Mac+iPhone). Java ME has 6.1%. Symbian has 2.5%
I wonder what the error bars are those numbers are. Are they tidy enough to justify using two decimal points?
Certainly how is it bad news for microsoft? It's just saying that people are upgrading from XP to 7
Windows Mobile's 0.04% market share is not included in the 92.52% of Windows machines reported, but rather, part of "other":
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8
Therefore, the non-MS market has just been downsized to 7.44% and Linux's share of that is accordingly bumped up to 13.44%.
However, the iPod touch (0.07%) is also not counted in the iPhone's 0.36% market share, so Apple's relative share of that same market goes up to 74.60%.
Another interesting tidbit from these (questionably reliable) numbers: Blackberry and Android are roughly tied in market share based on web traffic, both registering at 0.03%. This is probably a testament to the superior browser on Android rather than actual market share by units sold (and the same with the iPhone).
Net Applications confirms it.
Property is theft.
There are no error bars. This is a straight dump from their collected information on web traffic.
Anyone who mistakes this information for a statistical evaluation of actual market share by physical units or even actual market share by "web presence" is misusing the data.
They may well try to make a fairly representative sampling based on diversifying websites they collect data from, but day-to-day, let alone month-to-month, variation makes this data at best a rough approximation of the actual market. But they're not claiming that this data is a reflective snapshot of any actual market--they leave that to lazy journalists. Instead, what their statistics track are trends over time using a consistent methodology. It's a clue about the state of the actual market, but nothing more. Only lazy journalists would take a single month's reported numbers and make a claim about actual market share.
Their numbers are accurate to several decimal places--they have an exact count of the "survey respondents"--the over 100 million reporting machines each month. Where there is insufficient data is making a projection from that sample to the actual market (but again, the data can't realistically be used for that). Linux's NetApp share has bounced up and down a distance of 0.1% since the middle of the year. This probably has nothing to do with Linux's actual market share changing and more to do with variations in browsing habits and which sites are recorded.
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?
While using site stats is probably quite accurate for desktop OSes (they are all used virtually the same, most of them networked...and as a matter of fact, probably mostly some Windows machines aren't), it is totally meaningless for mobile phones.
Too many external factors.
Besides, we have some decent stats from other sources (there's a graph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone , though only for smartphones of course...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
So my 1 purchase will count as 2 copies of Windows 7 being sold.
The quoted figures are based on Internet usage, not sales. They will not be able to see operating systems that are not installed. Nor will they see computers that are not used for surfing the net. I have six computers that in active use, but only two of them are configured for web access.
That is why these stats are inadequate for really determining operating system usage. Unfortunately there really is no better system to count them.
PC gamers are abandoning XP and Vista and moving towards Windows 7. For the first time ever since Valve began publishing their hardware survey back in 2003, Windows XP usage among Steam users has finally dipped below the 50% mark, and is losing ground relatively fast. Steam Hardware Survey
There are no error bars. This is a straight dump from their collected information on web traffic.
You sure about that? This article indicates they have some form of weighting:
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/02/net-applications-apple-just-lost-half-its-market-share/
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Linux, therefore has 13.37% of the "non-MS market".
If that isn't proof Linux is awesome then I don't know what is.
You are assuming that 100% of Symbian devices sold are used for web browsing. Considering the amount that some phone companies charge for data access, I very much doubt the figure would be anywhere near that percentage. Given how quickly people seem to upgrade their phones, I would also doubt that a lot of those devices are still in active use.
A year ago half of global population had mobile phones, now probably around 4.5 billion. Nokia has around 40% of that. There's no way Symbian smartphones amount to half of their produced handsets (just look around you...and remember that you live in developed world; in reality, S30 and S40 (which are NOT Symbian) dominate)
BTW, a billionth Nokia phone, sold in 2005, was Nokia 1100. As far from the "smartphone" as it can be...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I have not. Sure, in server rooms I've seen some Gnome desktops lit, mostly so the sysadmins could surf. But in the wild? Not once, in 10 years of looking. The closest I saw was a BSD laptop brought in by a job applicant for an IT position.
My brother and I both use Linux desktops, he more faithfully than me -- I have a multiple boot between Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), but I tend to boot into Windows and putty ssh to administer Linux server boxen and use a vmware guest of centos for my php scripting work. He's very hard core -- all Linux, mostly Fedora, no multiple boot and no vmware. He's seen some Linux desktops, but only at meetup.com meetings and local LUG meetings.
I'm in Canada, in case that is significant, and I gather there is more Linux in Europe than here (Linux Format is expensive but awesome). But 2%? Or even 1%? I don't think so. I walk by a university's glass wall a few times I week, but the only thing I've noticed there is that 50% of the students use mac books.
So I ask you: have you ever seen a Linux desktop in the wild? LUG meetings do not count. Here's my definition of what counts: coffee shops, restaurants, airports, trains, lobbies, office cubicles, etc.
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
I could have sworn that XP's share relative to Windows 7 would grow once 7 was actually released. Because I'm Commander Cuckoo Bananas, woopwoopwoop!!!
I bet most of those using Windows 7 bought new PCs with it installed. Most people do not upgrade the OS their PC uses. And businesses as well as others who need to get work should wait until MS releases the first service pack before upgrading. Wait until MS fixes the bugs and holes.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The weighting isn't based on projections to an actual market share, though. That's the missing step.
Error bars and statistical confidence are applicable only when stating that a sample is reflective of a population. This data is not reflective of a population. It's just a calculation of raw data passed through a systemic algorithm.
For a simplistic example, if I have a data collection method that tracks occurrences through two populations, A and B, and I discard 50% of population B because that's the sample weight I've adopted, I don't need error bars when listing my results:
A: 1374/9978 or 13.77%
B: 3430/10035 or 34.18% [weighted at 50%] = 17.09%
There's no need for error bars or a discussion of confidence. It's only when I take the next step and make a projection concluding that "13.77% of Americans have X" that I need to go further. If I'm only talking about the results of my sample set itself, it's just straight math: 13.77% of group A. No plus or minus.
The weighting by country changes the reported numbers in a way that the surveyors obviously hope is more reflective of reality, but until they make a projection to reality, it's still just in the end a multiplier on the raw calculation.
Steveo gave a presentation to investors in Feb.2009 and the graph he was using shows the desktops and 1 was Windows, 2 was Windows pirated and the graph looks like Linux is slightly ahead of Mac.
Was Ballmer lying to investors?
I dont know but seems to me that "Ballmer says Linux desktops are higher than Mac." should have been better covered.
As for the 1% meme that became popular this year, go back 3-5 years and you will see the numbers spouted back then were 2-6%.
Really. I just did a survey of all the computers in my house. Three were running Ubuntu Linux, one was running Windows Vista.
That's a 75% market share!
I think the recession plays a major factor in Apple's slight drop. Apple's smart in holding the line, however, since they don't want a large line of low margin products that will have heavy support costs. After the recession fades, they want to look consistent with their pricing.
Also, I wonder if they counted virtual machines in the survey?
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?
It is a shame that the old tricks do not work now since they switched to umm wait it still might work for you....
If your new notebook has a SLIC 2.0 BIOS you could just download the ISO file and burn it then install that with out having to buy it 2 times.
If you have time you could return the purchased copy or install with the purchased DVD and save your key for a different computer :)
I think if you buy a DVD retail copy it comes with a key for installing it, but when it comes on something like a Dell or Compaq they use a key stored in the BIOS so when you install windows it never asks for the key.
Anyway enjoy Windows 7 contrary to what some people will tell you its not a bad OS and is quite a good tool.
so what your telling me is that the data only tells us how much net traffic windows generates, are we to conclude that this is because of market share, or that linux and mac users are actually doing some work instead of surfing facebook slashdot wiki ect, it is of course the correlation of the two. also does this take into account any of the traffic from compromised windows machines? my sshserver gets allot of hits from random computers in far of lands trying to log in, I bet they are all windows machines, nasty little M$ bonnets, thankfully i use rsa, and have disabled password and root access.
Remind me again why you willingly purchased two licenses for the same software? I mean, I do understand your hatred for bloat-ware and all... But that license doesn't preclude you from uninstalling all of it, or better yet, installing from a virgin OEM disc. Legally.
How?
The NetApp data: Windows: 92.52% Mac OS X: 5.12% Linux (all flavors): 1.00% Other (including iPhone, Symbian, Java ME): 1.36%
That's 7.48% "non-MS share" on these numbers (and really only non-Windows--it's not apparent whether they count Windows Mobile as "Windows" or as "Other"). Linux, therefore has 13.37% of the "non-MS market". For comparison of the other ones broken out entirely, Apple has 73.26% of that market (Mac+iPhone). Java ME has 6.1%. Symbian has 2.5%
Windows 7 has been a huge seller and revenue generator for Microsoft, breaking all previous OS sales records (While at the same time reducing support and maintencance costs of Windows XP since it is cheaper to support Windows 7 than Windows XP, so more XP -> 7 conversions = less cost to MS), but according to the article this is somehow running in place? All companies wish to be so lucky...
Ah, but how many of those Windows 7 sales were new PCs that got wiped and Linux installed in place? Also, we know how prejudiced Net Apps numbers are.
I suspect Net Apps numbers. I don't see any Macs defecting to Windows. Why should they? I also don't see Macs trading for Linux. Macs are used primarily by artists, and Mac faithful. I think perhaps they are playing with their numbers. I'd like to see the raw numbers and their methodology.
Not to mention who knows how well/bad they are weighting the numbers. Odd, too, that they changed their methodology two years ago. Why? Do the weights really reflect the internet populations of the other countries? Are the visitors from other countries to the websites they track typical users of those countries? In my experience, with interactions with non-US users outside of the tech areas, is that the number of Linux desktops is a tad higher than what Net Apps reports. According to my experience excluding geeks and IT association is somewhere between 5% and 10% of users are Linux users. But, my numbers are anecdotal at best, and I have a fair number of non-US contacts. We also don't know what those 40,000 sites, they monitor, are? Do they include any windows support sites? Do they include any sites likely to be used by Linux users?
Furthermore, maybe the Linux numbers are lower because Linux users tend to hit different sites more and the ones they are tracking less? Lastly, is the methodology robust enough to say that Mac users really fell 0.14% or 0.0014 fractional? Is their methodology really accurate to FOUR decimal places!? Wow! That must be the best damn population estimation algorithm EVER! They ought to patent that sucker! Just kidding. Sure there are math techniques to get 4 place accuracy, but you're making an statistical approximation of an estimated population based on an estimated random distribution! And that is going to be accurate to four decimal places! Wow. Just WOW!
How many Windows machines also have a linux distribution installed? I would bet a tangible percentage of the windows market share would also have a Linux distribution in dual boot. Bare in mind here Net Applications market share research is based on visits to web pages. There is a way that many more linux installations could be hiding out there: It's plausible a good number of such systems may see Windows used for surfing/chilling, but linux not heavily used for visits to web pages. In any case clearly 1.2% market share does not fairly characterise the total number of non-server linux installations on PCs.
Do any 'dotters know of any research out there where someone surveyed the major distributions to gather statistics on the number of active installations?? As they should be able to get this data from updates downloaded from repositories etc. and then work towards finding a total number of systems in use. I would presume Microsoft has excellent statistics on usage from monitoring their update servers.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
And I don't think there are 487 billion copies of Windows.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
Time.
He'd have to wait for the laptop to be delivered, call support and order the darn OEMdisc (because they never ship with them anymore), which would probably cost him $10 or so...then he has to wait for that to be delivered.
Meh... Sometimes better to spend the $200 and just be done with it.
I wouldn't do it, you wouldn't do it...simply means our time isn't worth as much to us as his is to him.
I wonder how many of these swaps were corporate users finally dumping their very old XP machines after having avoided Vista for so long? If so, I hope they like their pre-SP1 OS...
Would love to hear what games you are having issues with. WoW, every Steam game in existance, FlatOut, the few NFS games I've tried... all work for me just fine.
Of course, I haven't tried running Champions of Krynn...but that barely worked on Windows 95, so....
Curious that you didn't name what these sites are. I've never see Linux web metric numbers over about 1%
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Net Applications measure OS Identified by Web Browser Share not Market Share and not really anything relevant to market share. Please correct the summary. (I did not notice tfa calling it fms)
My main gripe with the percentages that they commonly cite is that it is worldwide and includes every computer that runs Windows or Mac/Apple/etc ever made, despite the fact that what we should be concerned about is new sales only. Counting legacy hardware in that percentage is extremely disingenuous to say the least, since almost nobody uses 10+ year old PCs these days. Counting every PC on the planet is also bonus as well, since that also includes pretty much every obsolete computer that can possibly connect to the net.
***I found this tag line in a current article***
In November, 89.6% of users who connected to the Web sites that Net Applications Inc. monitors did so from systems powered by Windows
***
So what that means is that if you don't connect to one of those sites, you're not counted. If you have it set up so that you don't give out that information to remote sites, you're not counted either. If you are running Windows 98 or even 3.11 and connect, you're counted as a Windows machine. If you connect more than once or hit more than one of their monitored sites, well, you're counted all those extra times as well. It's simply put, the collection method is full of holes and makes for bogus statistics.
What matters in commerce at almost every level is what's being sold and moved out the door. We don't care about how used car sales are doing, for instance. We care about NEW ones and how the companies that make NEW cars are doing(or not doing as the case seems to be lately)
***I found this online in the news feeds, dated 10/25/2009***
Apple's US retail desktop revenue share for October was 47.71 percent, up from same time last year when it hit 33.44 percent.
***
Current actual sales data from October shows Apple at 47.71% of the new computer market in the U.S. and a whopping 91% of $1000+ sales in the U.S.
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.
I got karma to burn.
Been a switch-hitter between Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows for years. For the past year or so, it's been Ubuntu and Vista. I'd say I spent equal time in both. I've got Ubuntu tweaked to my liking, and when I was mobile, usually used Linux because of the fast boot and wake-from-RAM times. Vista had to be there, well, because Linux multimedia just blows. It took me the good part of a week to get my laptop dock's S/PDIF port to work, and that was only after manually ripping out ALSA and building OSS4 from scratch, and even then, it only ever saw the S/PDIF port as 44.1kHz, 16-bit capable. That said, I enjoy using it, I'm not afraid of the command line, but we've still got a long way to go. I'm not quite yet comfortable with recommending Linux to firends and family. Kudos to getting back up to 1% though!
Windows 7 got clean-installed about a week ago. To me, the UI seems much smoother (No more bajillion clicks to get to a NIC's IP settings page), even the Start menu was given a once-over. To me, it's just as good as Windows 2000, and a marked improvement over XP. But who knows, It's only got a week of clutter on it yet.
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.
Trying to cast the story in the beset possible light, the OP has to fold, staple and mutilate the simple content of the TFA to avoid its real negative implications for Linux market share now and in the future. Look for instance at this graphic (also from hitslink.com), which really shows how hopeless the situation is for Linux.
This is not a self-referential sig.
You have a point about Linux users but the Mac users, especially the switchers are a fickle bunch who would happily go back to Windows if it meant their MSN Messenger would work the same as it used to. Mac's gained a small amount of market share over vista's crappiness but this has all been fixed(TM) in Windows 7 at least according to MS marketing.
I am one of those switchers, and I don't use MSN Messenger. The only IM client I have used is Yahoo! Messenger, which besides Windows in available for OS X, there is also a web based version. I didn't switch because of Vista's happiness's either, I switched because I wanted something stable and because I hate being treated like a criminal. I first switched to Linux for my desktop, which has the capabilities so I can setup it up as a server. Then for a laptop I got a MacBook Pro.
Many of the switchers I know were just as unhappy with their Macs as they were with their Vista boxes
Before I ever got my Linux PC and Mac I wondered why I ever got a Windows PC instead of a Mac, back when I got my first Windows PC you had to be a wizard to install and use Linux. But SGI Irix PCs were available.
so many are jumping at the chance to go back to 7 after being promised that it was all fixed(TM)
As long as Microsoft requires activation and spyware I will not willingly buy Windows or a Windows PC.
what about us dual booters. Like many Linux users I'm counted twice as I dual boot most machines I own.
Currently I have one PC that dual boots Redhat Linux and NT4, but I have not booted it up in years. I plan though to setup my Mac I'm typing this on to dualboot, Snow Leopard and Ubuntu.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
At least Microsoft can finally compete with itself again. It used to be a running joke with Vista.
"MS to leave OS market, XP's competition too strong."
Or Just me? I have several NTFS formatted Seagate 2.0 Terabyte drives that are fine under Linux, XP SP3 and Leopard that appear as 99.9 Megabyte (NOT GigaByte) drives under Windows 7 and without any files. Rendering Windows 7 totally useless with my data. Yes, All drivers and the BIOS are both up to date for my GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard.
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
In other news, KDE 4 is slower than KDE 3 (which was slower that KDE 2, etc).
All you people are liars. Nobody uses Linux. Nobody! Just read our statistics. There are no real Linux users here. All those other people on all those other sites bashing windows are fictional too! The Free Software Consortium has hired a hundred thousand unemployed Haitian bloggers to type away at these comments sixteen hours a day under the cruelest conditions for pennies a day. They live in cages and actually use Windows 7 and IE 8 and have to pretend to hate all that is right and good. It's inhuman and must be stopped.
What's worse is the FSC funds their immoral astroturfing with the funds from their hacker network, exploiting and pwning our precious Windows machines from their secret hideouts in Eastern Europe and China. It's true! They pore over every orifice of every application desperately seeking to penetrate the purity of Windows and Office in a vile attempt to convert the world to the cruel tyrrany of their "freedoms" and "choice".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you cherry pick the profitable users, with their high-margin high-ticket glitterboxes Apple's doing well. But what really matters is umumble mumble.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...dang...was gonna post that meself till I saw it already posted...neva mind... :)
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's 7.48% "non-MS share" on these numbers (and really only non-Windows--it's not apparent whether they count Windows Mobile as "Windows" or as "Other"). Linux, therefore has 13.37% of the "non-MS market".
Interesting percentage there.
I get this problem a lot. I wonder how many folks go to mostly ad-free sites as I do. Most of the .gov and .edu sites are probably not installing "Global Market Share" on their servers.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The Gateway laptop I bought ~2 years ago came with OEM discs, which to my surprise only contained the OS (as I discovered when I reformatted to remove the recovery partition).
"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%."
1% is a winner? Wow, that's quite hilarious. Linux is as the bottom- of the bottom feeder market and yet you think you are the winnar!
Or at least, the point of the verbage. It's news that people who buy an upgrade stop using the old version? Is news is that people weren't buying Vista and and people are convinced that Windows 7 is the Windows upgrade that Vista was supposed to be all along. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I really don't get what point is being made here. All the responses I've seen have been about the effect on the Linux/MacOS market, and that might all be true, but it doesn't seem to be the point the OP is trying to make. Or is the point really just "here's some sales numbers" and the headline is just the best one can do with such a bland piece of news?
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.
Indeed.
The Year of the Linux *Desktop* might not have materialized yet.
But the Year of the Linux *At Home* has passed long time ago : given that almost every house today has a router / cable-DSL-modem / WiFi and most of the time such device are running Linux in their firmware, almost every household has a machine running Linux without even knowing it. Now throw in multrimedia player/harddisk enclosures and/or consumer-grade SAN/NAS into the equation and it's hard for anyone NOT to have Linux at home.
(And still, regardless of this omnipresence, most current viruses are still targeting Windows)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why, you lucky SoB. :p
Almost no-one does that anymore, unless they are business purchases. It sucks, but I don't buy OEM anymore so....meh.
> Linux came up a winner last month, returning to the 1% share mark for the first time since July.
Psst, I think we're winning.
We're like... the Hells Angels, or the Warlocks, or the Mongols! 1%er's baby!!! ;-)
Someone should put a 1%er's biker club logo on Tux :-)
Leet!
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The actual number of products such as Active Directory are only used in a limited way by a limited few corporations and other entities. It is disappointing to think that (of the billion or so computers used worldwide) people here seem to think that the vast majority are part of those few corporations and are used within Active Directory at that.
There seems to be some contention in this thread about what the value of Win7 is when you can use Linux (or other free OSes) instead. The obvious retort by the Win7 fans is that it supports Active Directory. No matter what you think that product just isn't a product for the vast majority of users in the world. Not only do they not use it they wouldn't even begin to know what it means. Not only that they wouldn't have a clue what to do with it if they knew what it meant.
People need to take a step back and ask themselves what they are justifying and whom for. You don't justify win7 by saying the average user can use Active Directory (or other features) if they don't use it nor ever will. In regard to other OSes, while LDAP is considered by some to be a major element of Active Directory, OpenLDAP is available. Thus that eliminates the Win7 advantage (except that Active Directory offers other benefits), but nonetheless there is no need to even consider any argument as the vast majority of computer users will never use and do not need any LDAP feature or Active Directory feature).
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.