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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 suspect the days of people running out and buying Windows upgrades in droves are behind us. The excitement and wonder doesn't happen anymore because the OS we already have by and large does what we need an OS to do. What defines an OS is now mature, no longer making leaps and bounds of dramatic feature inclusions that matter to Joe Average. Even IT guys are unimpressed.
Second point: I had my first hands-on with Windows 7 today. I'm somewhat bewildered. In what way is this not Vista 1.1? Sure, okay, there are some cosmetic changes to the taskbar but really, I fail to find anything revolutionary. Certainly nothing that justifies the same folks who've said all along that Vista was "bad" to say that 7 is "awesome". Is a slight reduction in UAC prompts really enough?
"Oh no... he found the
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.
I know of 25 people who bought windows 7 to replace vista or XP. I still have bruises from the XP people. They were a bit annoyed that I had to back up and reinstall their apps. They thought it would upgrade them to 7. For some reason the vista people where happy to hear the word format. They even wanted to format the hard drive more then once to make sure vista was gone.
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!!
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.
"Vista runs on anything 7 runs on"
Not so. I have installed 7 on the very same hardware that Vista barfed on. I've never seen the BOSD on 7 that Vista threw up frequently. More, 7 runs beautifully in a VM, while Vista is something of a dog. As I said, 7 runs decently on a 1 ghz machine with one gig of RAM. Vista will not.
"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
Active directory is not only used to authenticate users, where it's value is derived from is the ability to organized your entire computer network into organizational units and apply custom policies to each of those OUs. Think of this as having a *nix repository for every OU and in this repo there is a custom script to modify /etc to apply the correct policy to all your machines. Now add the ability to do all this with a couple mouse clicks. This is active directory.