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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!!
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.
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%
Certainly how is it bad news for microsoft? It's just saying that people are upgrading from XP to 7
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?
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.
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?
I assume you are only counting desktops. In my house I have 2 - Windows 7 Desktops 1 - XP nettop 1 - XP Media Box (XBMC) 1 - Linux Desktop 5 - Linux Wireless Routers (2 for a wireless to wireless router when I travel) 2 - Linux TVs 2 - Linux NAS 1 - Linux VOIP adapter 1 - Linux Phone (Android actually, but that sits on top of Linux) That puts me at 4 Windows and 12 Linux systems in my home, so Linux has a 75% market share here too. I would guess that there are a LOT more people running Linux in their homes than are counted or even realize it.
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.
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 $200 price tag.
So Windows 7 is "growing"? Sounds like I should "upgrade" by changing my general.useragent.override sometime soon, all those sites who do not work if you admit GNU/Linux as OS but do work if you are "using" Windows will probably start working great "using" Windows 7 sometime in the near future.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
so what your telling me is that the data only tells us how much net traffic windows generates
No. You're misusing the numbers. It shows what proportion of the traffic they monitor, from the sites they monitor, weighted the way they weight it, comes from machines reporting themselves as Windows (or Linux, or BSD, or OS X) computers.
are we to conclude that this is because of market share, or that linux and mac users are actually doing some work
Neither.
it is of course the correlation of the two.
Nope. The data collected is for relative trends, not for overall "net traffic" or for install base market share or for active users or any other actual market.
By using the same methodology consistently, the relative reporting in your sample size can show clues about projections of adoptions of new versions, shifts to other platforms, and other generalized trends. It may indicate relative changes in market share by showing consistent gains or losses over time, and it is weighted in such a way as to approximate market share estimates from other sources, but it is not a projection of any actual market, whether that market is units sold, units in active use, "net traffic", or anything else.
also does this take into account any of the traffic from compromised windows machines?
No effect, unless those "little M$ bonnets" (botnets?) are being directed to open a browser and load one or more of the tracked websites.