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Windows XP Market Share Finally Falls Below 50%
An anonymous reader writes "At the end of July 2011, Microsoft can say that Windows XP finally fell below the 50 percent mark. In other words, Redmond's decade-old operating system is now used by less than half of all Internet users."
That doesn't really seem like a logical upgrade path for an XP user. It makes a lot more sense for an XP user to move to Win7.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Yes, WinXP has dropped below 50% of the total market. But according to TFA, WinXP still has a 57% share of Windows installations.
Windows 7 is the new XP
Remember XP ends support in April 2014. Guess what XP's marketshare will be by them?
I never get any support from MS anyway. I used win2k for years after MS dropped support.
The logical path is to stick with XP. And that seems to be what most people are doing.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
We have new hardware to install in my church's office. The old computers run XP, purchased as charity licenses. The new hardware came with Vista (bleck!), and I was hoping we could install Windows 7 instead. However, it seems that Microsoft decided to do away with charity licenses. That means that we'd be stuck spending over $400 for a 3-pack of licenses for machines that totaled $750 in hardware. That's not even remotely going to happen. As a result, we're going to be shoe-horning XP back onto the *new* machines, and I'll be installing an Ubuntu dual-boot on them to see if there's any way to get the staff to consider moving to it. Go-go-gadget greed, Microsoft!
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Because the Pentium 4 was inefficient garbage. Assuming you leave it on all the time and replaced the board and processor with a Core 2 three years ago, you would have already made up the difference in power savings.
The logical path is to stick with XP.
I don't think you know what a path is.
Honestly if you don't want or need the new features and have adequately secured your install ... Its fine to run older software as long as you aren't being limited by it or are OK with those limitations.
That's exactly what I think. My parents (in their sixties) use Windows XP that I installed, keep as up to date as it can be in terms of patches and the like, set them up with a lovely user account that limits what can be done. For the word processing that mum does, and the occasional bit of surfing that they do, there is totally no need for them to upgrade - and trying to teach them how to make things work ("How do I shut it down now? The button used to be there and look like this...") really isn't worth the neglidgable benefit to them.
It is exactly like the old phones that they have - okay, color screens and the like, but no smartphone, no web surfing. They use it for making calls and the (very) occasional text message. Why on earth would they want to "upgrade" to a new shiny smartphone that they have to learn all over again for the simple features and would never use the additional stuff?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Apple has been found to give its users a religious experience. I'm sure this has nothing to do with them being a cult.
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-19/tech/apple.religion_1_apple-store-apple-employees-brains
"The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says.
The first episode of the documentary shows Apple employees "whipped up into some sort of crazy, evangelical frenzy" at the recent opening of an Apple store in London."
I thought so, but I put Win7 on a recently-built computer and I really like it. I had to make a few adjustments to fit the way I like to work, but at least those adjustments are possible with Win7.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Half the people I know with macs have installed Windows 7 on them. About half of those people have stopped using OSX all together, and intend on never buying Apple products again. Aren't anecdotes fun.
For a new computer, Win7 makes sense. However, I don't see much reason to upgrade an existing computer that is running Windows XP perfectly well. The only reason I can think of is if one's running 32-bit XP on a 64-bit computer and want to increase the RAM.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
Actually I'll switch it up. I carefully waited for the specs to "mature" then I got an iPhone 3GS as a direct upgrade from an old Windows Mobile 6 phone. Clear improvement. But NOW I see no reason to upgrade "just to an iPhone 4".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I use Win XP to run Quicken 2008 in a VMware virtual machine on OS X. I paid $100 for an OEM version of XP a few years ago for this very purpose. I won't upgrade until there's no other alternative.
We have new hardware to install in my church's office. The old computers run XP, purchased as charity licenses. The new hardware came with Vista and I was hoping we could install Windows 7 instead. As a result, we're going to be shoe-horning XP back onto the *new* machines, and I'll be installing an Ubuntu dual-boot on them to see if there's any way to get the staff to consider moving to it. Go-go-gadget greed, Microsoft!
Tech for non-profits:
TechSoup Global, founded in 1987 as The CompuMentor Project, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides technology assistance to other nonprofit organizations in the United States and in 35 countries.
TechSoup.Org Product Donations, originally known as DiscounTech and later as TechSoup Stock, is a technology product philanthropy service for nonprofits which was launched in January 2002. It is the exclusive U.S. distributor of Microsoft product donations, and helps to connect nonprofits and libraries to over 430 different product donations from 45 donating partners (including Cisco, Symantec, Sun and Adobe).
TechSoup TechSoup
Microsoft software donations are still mainstays of the TechSoup program. And it's a good thing! Since they started the program in 1998, Microsoft has donated more than $3.9 billion worth of software to nonprofit organizations in more than 100 countries worldwide, now reaching over 40,000 nonprofits each year.
Organizations can now request Microsoft products as needed, not just once per year. Also, there is no longer a five-seat minimum requirement, so an organization can request just one license if that is all it needs.
Now you can request from up to 10 different Microsoft title groups in each two-year cycle
Take our Check Program Eligibility Quiz --- see if you're eligible for Microsoft and our 44 other donation programs.
To learn more about the updates to the Microsoft Software Donation Program and how they affect your organization, visit our Overview of the Microsoft Software Donation Program. Then, join us on August 4, 2011, for a free webinar Microsoft Donation Program: How Does It Work?
Good News! Updates to the Microsoft Software Donation Program [July 27]
Yes, yes, security concerns and all... but since when does Joe Randomuser care?
WinXP is the first Windows OS that has everything the user wants, even when the next system (actually, the two next systems) is out. When 98 came out, it was a definite upgrade to 95, not to mention that quite a few games soon required 98SE. 2k was a big leap ahead from 98 and NT, combining the versatility of the 9x line with the stability of the NT line, adding out of the box USB support to both. XP again brought new bells and whistles and WiFi support, more stability and more user friendliness.
No, I didn't forget ME. I decided to ignore regressions in development.
But Vista/7? What's the big benefit compared to XP?
DirectX10? So what? Few games really require it, you can do without. Aero? Please, let's talk about something useful, shall we? Now, I am probably not an expert on Windows, but that's pretty much all where I can see Vista/7 sing "everything you do I can do better".
There is simply no reason for people to jump onto Vista/7. I do assume that the "drop" in XP is simply due to people getting new computers with a new system, which is pretty much by default not XP but probably Win7 if they decide for a Windows OS.
tl;dr version: Nothing to see here, move along.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
.
When an OS -- even from a company you don't like -- does the job it's supposed to do, what's the problem? Of course I like my various *nix installs as long as they do what I need them to do, but if you have to use Windows for anything, XP is the last in a (supported) line which will still more or less do what you tell it to do. You may recall that XP (like everything before it) installs with a basic version of Win3.1.
Alexa shows Wikipedia to be the 7th most popular site on the web. Wikipedia is unique in that it is one of the few top sites not run for profit. Consequently, they allow open traffic analysis of their web traffic to some extent, which I have found very useful. Here is what operating systems hit Wikipedia web sites in June 2011. They have that data for May, April and so forth. I made a chart from the data a few months ago on my blog.
For June in Wikipedia, XP was 36-37% of traffic. Vista was about 13% of traffic. Windows 7 was 29-30% of traffic. Mac plus iPhone plus iPad was 12% of traffic. Android was 1.4% of traffic, and Ubuntu was 0.5% of traffic.
it was one of the few things that ran fine on a k62 with a VIA chipset
Still running it on a Dell P4 with 2gb ram. Yet to see a reason to upgrade. I don't game, I don't code. What do I need to upgrade for?
Don't game, don't code. What do ya do?
Subtle innuendos follow
Desktop Linux: 1% and holding!
Margin of error of measurement: ±1%
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Maybe I'll meet you someday, wandering the halls around 1 Infinite Loop!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree, absolutely.
All of my digital audio workstations that I use for music production still run XP SP3. Though I might see how my DAW apps run in Win7 just because I have access to a lot more RAM. The 64 bit versions that run in XP 64 are a little goofy still, but I hear the 64 bit versions run great in Windows 7.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apple is no longer a computer company. They're a phone marketing company that has a small computer branch that is an ever-shrinking chunk of their revenue (47% of Apple's revenue - and 52% of their profit - comes from sales of just iPhones).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
DOS - good old DOS!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Adam, adam, adam!, adam, adam, ad. adam. Adam!, adam, adum, adum... (oh... that does not appear to be Adam...It looks like Steve...) Steve!, Steve steve, steve, eteve, steve...............
Windows 7 is GREAT for DAWs. ReWireing Reason 5 into Live 8 without a hitch, couldn't do that on XP.
Comparing all recently sold android devices to all recently sold IOS devices the android devices come out on top by a wide margin. IOS isn't even dominating severely on a phone by phone basis and there is only one single source of it.
Take me for example, I've had a LOT of phones in the past and by far my #1 requirement is reception. Not how shiny it is. As such I tend to prefer motorola, samsung, or blackberries. HTC has mediocre reception, on par with what I've seen from the iphone, which won't work at all in a lot of places that I get perfectly clear phone calls on my Droid.
However, Motorola doesn't always have the phone with the best reception. They have great antennas but I guess sometimes the rest of the phone guts messes with it. Generally if they aren't on top then samsung is, and RIM have had a couple of real winners up their sleeves.
Now, due to the feature set and what I can do with it, I'm definitely buying a phone with Android on it in the future (sorry RIM, but your OS sucks balls even for the enterprise uses it used to be great for) but I'm not necessarily going to buy it from Motorola next time around.
Thus you end up with the only real way to compare is as an OS vs OS, not on a manufacturer scale.
The iphone is a shiny piece of shit. Works great in cities but thats about it. It really does spark some kind of religious zealotry in its owner for some strange reason though. Even while I'm lending my droid to a friend of mine I travel with because his iphone won't work he can't stop spouting excuses on behalf of apple.
Now if iOS was licensed to a competent manufacturer and would start getting good reception then I might consider switching. This is a big might however as I like the way my Android device integrates with most of the Google products I am already using.
I just don't understand why guys that are supposed to be good at math just can't seem to grasp that yes Linux only has 1% and this is even giving Linux the benefit of the doubt by using heavily nerdish sites like /. in the counting!
As a PC retailer who has tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS on the stacks of off lease office PCs that go through the shop I'll be happy to tell you why Linux is stuck at 1%...your driver model sucks! I'd love to be able to offer Linux on my PCs, as most of what my customers do can easily be done on any Web accessing OS, but until you fix the driver model so that the 6 month upgrades don't make the drivers shit themselves? Well I just can't carry your product.
I have 8+ year old XP boxes in the field where the only thing I've had to do was the occasional hardware upgrade but out of all the office boxes I tried not a single one survived the 6 month deathmarch unscathed with all having at least 1 driver shit itself, usually more than 1, and it didn't matter if I used FOSS or non FOSS drivers it was the same. But what can you expect when the head of Linux, old Linus Torvalds himself says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans, it'll go like a virus LOL! yeah Linus its called the clap. That kind of attitude was fine when it was just him and his buds trading builds on IRC, but it ain't 1993 anymore and that kind of bullshit won't cut it in retail.
As a wise Linux user told me when I complained about the constant driver breaks "Yeah, it does that, you just have to get used to it" which is fine if your time is worthless and you think spending an evening in front of Bash while trawlling the forums for "fixes" is nice? Then I'm happy for you. But as a retailer I can tell you that kind of shit just won't fly if you want more than the 1% you currently have. if you want the public to embrace you then you have to give them what THEY want, not tell them they have to do things YOUR way. They will NOT "Open up Bash and type" and in fact see the term for what it is, a 70s throwback that doesn't belong on a modern OS, they will NOT trawl forums for "fixes", nor will they spend days looking up obsolete hardware lists in the hopes of finding something that they can buy that will actually work in Linux.
Fix this, make it so there is a stable ABI or hell sacrifice Linus to Cthulu if that is what it takes so drivers are "write once, use for years" and retailers like me will be happy to carry your product. think we like shelling out for Windows licenses? Hell no! But I can't sell a product where every 6 months something can be broken for a week or more because Linus got an itch and Goatse'd the kernel. It is simple math folks, you have X number of guys qualified to maintain drivers, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers. Even if the driver devs never slept and spent 24/7 doing nothing but rewriting borked drivers you would ALWAYS be behind!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
He didn't say how many of those employees use a computer. Could be 3 managers with macs and 49,997 Chinese factory workers with no computer at all...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
From personal experience at Apple, board layout and mechanical design is done with PC-based tools, not UNIX offerings. Specifically PADS/PCB and Solidworks.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Let me guess...the only people that make these mythical perfect Linux drivers are the guys writing for enterprise hardware, which if you are gonna pay that kind of money why not just buy Apple and have the resale value down the line? And doesn't that drive a stake in the whole "Linux is a drop in replacement for Windows!" meme that has been pushed here so often?
Because here are the different drivers that have broken on different hardware during the upgrade deathmarch, in no particular order, and we are talking BOTH non free AND FOSS since one of the helpful "hints" I got was "you should use FOSS drivers!" while not bothering to tell me most of the FOSS drivers are crippled, like the all in one printer that under FOSS drivers becomes a 'kinda sorta when it isn't crashing" printer with NO scanner or fax.
Well here goes, ATI, Broadcom, Realtek (both Ethernet and sound) Via, Ali, Sigmatek, Nvidia, oh and Intel which didn't die completely but instead became so flaky as to be unusable so I don't know whether or not dying would have been preferable.
I'm sorry but that is just nuts! In fact the ONLY box I had survive the upgrade deathmarch with 100% functionality was a circa 1999 P3 733Mhz Intel SFF. Needless to say there isn't exactly a market for shit more than a decade old and that box got to end up taking its functional Linux to the dump since I didn't have a use for something THAT damned slow.
Its actually VERY simple: Apple, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OS/2...what do all these have in common? A stable ABI that actually works. But as long as Torvalds is at the helm you can give it up, he'll NEVER let you have one. If he did he would have to admit he was wrong and he'd quit before doing that. Demand change, demand an ABI, or hell if you don't like ABIs design a way that Torvalds can Goatse the kernel without shatting on the drivers. Because as it is you will never gain above 3% max, simply because the majority isn't gonna deal with that broken driver bullshit. That crap was acceptable in 1992 but it ain't 1992 anymore, time for Linux to join the 21st century!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
When was the last time you tried Linux?
Honest question. I used to have issues with drivers gakking themselves, but that has been quite some time. These days, everything in my computers "just works". Even my brand new laptop, which actually came with Ubuntu preinstalled on it (I replaced it with my distro of choice, but let's not get into that flamewar, yeah?), everything works out of the box. Installing my printer was a bit of a pain, but it wasn't impossible... I just had to download the ppd file for the printer, and once that was done, it works fine too. Graphics, wifi, sound, bluetooth, webcam/mic, it all "just works", at least as well as Windows 7 "just works", if not better.
Graphics *can* be a bone of contention... ATi still doesn't have a clue how to write a decent driver, and NVidia, while able to write good drivers, insists on doing them as a binary blob, but both vendors are completely usable, you just need to redownload and rebuild/reinstall the driver every time you update the kernel (which can be avoided by blacklisting the kernel from updates). And if you want to avoid that kind of hassle, get a system with an Intel graphics card... Intel has taken the right approach by opening it up completely and working with the kernel developpers, and the result is that you don't need to install drivers at all, because the driver is part of the kernel source.
Use what works for you, but if you do want to try getting Linux to work, I'd suggest you give it a try with a more recent distro.
One person's anecdotal experience here: I've run between 2-5 Linux boxen for about 13 years, most of which did some combination of desktop, server, and real-time audio processing, and during that time, on a box I built and installed myself, I have NEVER had a driver regression, EVER. I've seen plenty while helping friends with Ubuntu and other allegedly user-friendlier distros. But insofar as possible, I use only officially-supported hardware, with free (libre) drivers, and I also use a source-based distribution (Gentoo) which allows me to upgrade kernel, OS, and application functionality separately and on my own schedule. If I suspect that the upgrade of a kernel or anything else has broken something, I can always downgrade to a previous version, with very little risk of permanent dependency breakage due to tools such as the slots mechanism and revdep-rebuild. (The latter detects and fixes the temporary breakage that can result from package downgrades or subtlely broken ebuilds, which do happen from time to time.) I'm not saying a stable ABI wouldn't be useful or that many Linux users don't experience significant pain when trying to upgrade. I am saying that my approach mostly avoids this kind of problem, and that in my view at least it is more true to the way Linux and free software in general was designed to work. The code is the source. The binaries are merely an intermediate representation of the code, and can be easily updated or replaced as long as the source remains available and open.
Nonaggression works!