Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer Market Share Drops To Almost 15%
glitch0 writes "Internet Explorer used to be the most prevalent browser with a market share that peaked at 88% in March of 2003. Now they're down to almost 15% due to stiff competition from Google, Mozilla, and even Apple. What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?"
what about Opera?
*goes back to sit in the corner*
Yes, IE is losing marketshare but w3 schools statistics says nothing about the general population. Of course people who are studying web technologies are going to use other browsers. I would have more confidence if a site like Google or Yahoo published statistics.
That is statistics FROM THEIR WEBSITE.
Worse, it is statistics from a website that technically literate people visit!
Why this managed to reach the frontpage is beyond me.
This isn't indicative of browser usage in any realistic manner.
Hell, they even said so on the page. It is their own user logs.
I would love IE to be irrevelant- maybe it would mean proprietary apps would finally work cross-browser in the future if the companies behind them want to remain relevant...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yes. All these other browsers still run on Windows, and they make no money from IE. I for one don't understand why they would really care that much.
I know a lot of businesses that have still standardized in IE. I can't believe that it could be that low. Also, with all the Macs and iPhones, Safari should be higher. I know many people have switched to Firefox and Chrome, but I don't think they have killed the others yet.
I'm no Internet Explorer fan, but let's be fair here... The statistics are from visitors of w3schools.com, a site that people go to for web development. How many web developers or people interested in web development use Internet Explorer? I imagine it would be an easy point to argue that most of these individuals decidedly do not tend to use Internet Explorer. Claiming IE use is down to "almost 15%" sourcing nothing but a single web site's logs seems hardly trust worthy.
Oh, I mean still accounting for almost three fourths of the OS market share won't save them? Let's remember what OS those browsers run on...
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
Statistics Are Often Misleading
You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.
Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers.
Also be aware that many statistics may have an incomplete or faulty browser detection. It is quite common by many web-stats report programs, not to detect the newest browsers.
(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures).
Quotes
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
Oscar Wilde
"First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure."
Mark Twain
First of all, it's closer to 17%. With the current rate of decrease we'll hit 15% in something like four months if nothing happens before that. More importantly...
(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)
Audience of W3Schools is people who are trying to learn the basics of certain web-related technologies and don't yet know that W3Schools is hardly the best place for that. Whether you like W3Schools or not, it's hardly representative of general population.
Maybe, though, what M$ did wasn't all that bad, after all, once they used their monopoly power to crush the competition despite offering a demonstrably inferior product, using FUD and leverage... they spurred the creation of FLOSS projects that might never have had reason to come into being without them. Remember, at one point, if you wanted a copy of Netscape Navigator, it cost like MONEY! Microsoft destroying their company by being able to undercut them since they also had an operating system that they were selling for NOT free, caused the folks at Netscape to give their product away for nothing, which has benefited us all immensely. Netscape, (in the form of Mozilla Firefox,) crushes Microsoft's comparatively crappy browser from beyond the grave. Pretty cool, when you think about it.
Whenever I think about this situation, I picture the scene from Star Trek II, with Netscape as Kahn, and Microsoft as Kirk, with Ricardo Montalbán saying "From Hell's heart I... STAB at thee... for hate's sake, I spit my last BREATH... at thee...." except in this case, the Enterprise doesn't get away in time, and now their market share is approaching 15%... I assume that means it's over 15%, and dropping. Great news for web developers who now have less reason to have to worry about whether or not M$'s non-standards-compliant browser will properly render their webpages, I guess. Microsoft continues its inexorable slide into irrelevance.
In my free time I run a vegetable gardening website - so a very non-technical, home-oriented audience. Looking at the entirety of 2012, Google Analytics reports the following (everything else is at 1% or less):
IE 34.19%
Firefox 22.52%
Safari 21.38%
Chrome 14.80%
Android Browser 4.42%
For OS I see
Windows 65.68%
Macintosh 15.57%
iPad 5.24%
Android 4.53%
iPhone 3.95%
iOS 2.09%
Linux 1.23%
#DeleteChrome
"I for one don't understand why they would really care that much."
Because it was (and still it can be, since it's bundled on Windows for free) a cornerstone on their lock-in strategy (along with Office and Exchange, and currently Sharepoint too). If they allow "the cloud" to reach the point when vendor lockin is not possible, Microsoft will have a very worrisome future.
Most people who use IE (at least the people I know) only use it because they just go for what ever the default is. This means they also go with IE's default settings which is MSN and BING, and this do make MS money.
If Win 8 does not do well, they will have much more to worry about then IE's market shares
I suspect that a lot of that 15% are corporate users that are told they must use IE for their internal applications. Keep in mind that a lot of companies are still using IE 6 and IE 7 because of vendor lock in on browser standards. Also, ASAIK SharePoint won't run on anything other that IE. Perhaps Firefox with the appropriate plug-ins but not Chrome or Safari. The other group to consider are the newbies whose PC came with IE installed. For many people, they think the only way to get on the internet is to use IE. As far as sophisticated users go, I know hardly anyone that uses IE by choice. My preference is Chrome. I haven't used IE in a non-corporate setting in years and I use computers every day.
What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?
It means they failed to pwn the internet, thank all the gods
But after Netscape withered it was Apache + BSD servers that kept them from it, not Firefox. If Microsoft had won on that front, they could have easily forced a MSInternet on us.
It was a close thing, but settled quite a few years ago. This story is about a symptom of *that* failure, not a failure in its own right. No need to use Microsoft products, if Microsoft doesn't pwn the infrastructure or file format.
They haven't given up pwning the PC yet, though. (New "secure" boot loader - mostly secure for Microsoft.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
invest in office chair companies.
windowsupdate.microsoft.com reports 99.9% IE user agents. IE is on a comeback!
(What? It's just as useful a metric as TFA.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
From TFA itself:
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.
Glitch0, please submit your résumé to CNN. They greatly value your kind of selective reading skills.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.
Net Applications collects stats for 12,415 clients the size of Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Roche, the Moz Foundation, CNN, the WSJ, the New York Times and so on. The guys paying for these stats don't give a damn about the geek. They do give a damn about what is happening in their core markets.
Desktop Browser Market Share
Statcounter exposes more of its stats --- and there can be some big surprises:
Top 12 Browser Versions In China
Mobile vs. Desktop in China
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
http://gs.statcounter.com/
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0
But you know, another anti-MS article. Whatever floats your boat I guess.
The link shows the browser stats ONLY for visitors to w3schools.com, which is notoriously skewed away from IE due to it being a techy site for people who tend to use other browsers 'cause they're web developers who use a variety of browsers. This is not news by any standard. Even the text below the chart says "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user." & "These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser."
Back in that time, Gates et al discovered the internet and its potential. At that time almost the only way to use the internet was via a web browser inside a PC (remember the AOL disks, trumpet winsock, etc?) Nowadays we have access to the web in many other ways. Now, if you tell me that xbox live usage is going down, then this is something to worry about.
three letters, baby - ie6! I haven't bought new underwear in 8 years, i fail to see why i should download a new browser.
just like apple did in the 80s with xerox and does now with patents?
Look people, let's all step back and look at what's going on here. /. is an anti-MS site. From the Bill Gates Cyborg, to the inherent bias of the articles published, it's not a fanboi of MS. Let's get over that.
/. would be a lot more fun to read if everyone would just get off their high horse already. Goddamn.
Linux/OSS Fans: Take the feather out of your cap, it doesn't mean anything. It's probably not even valid (just like it is invalid here).
Windows Fans: Stop getting butthurt about these types of articles. The OS market share is there, and that's the revenue generator.
Windows 8 will be a trainwreck. Too many changes for most users. The issue is windows 9 (whatever that will look like).
I'd figure the optical mouse would popularize itself with people who don't like cleaning gunk out of their electronics. That said, I wish I could find an optical mouse that I liked as much as this ball mouse I've been using for the last 14 years...
In my free time I run a vegetable gardening website - so a very non-technical, home-oriented audience.
You haven't told us the number of visitors to your site or its location.
No one who posts stats like yours to Slashdot ever does.
So we don't know how representative you are when compared to Burpee Seeds, Better Homes & Gardens...
The 4-H, Cornell University, Cooperative Extension (broken down by state and county) and any of the other 15 million or so "vegetable gardening" sites that will be exposed in a search through Google.
Logitech M-BA47 forever!
(with rubber sides, not plastic ones)
Windows 8 will be a trainwreck. Too many changes for most users. The issue is windows 9 (whatever that will look like).
Windows 9 will be called "Windows Classic" after the outcry that people don't like the taste of the New Windows. It will mostly be the same as Windows 8 except it will have a Start menu and people will love it, because they really aren't that smart.
Well... the thing is that people still desire a browser as part of their OS package. Without one, its too hard to get Firefox etc. Having to tell users to resort to the command line and FTP to get a web browser would confuse and anger a great many Windows consumers.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
older doesn't automatically mean worse, and more features aren't always a problem.. if anything, these days, software is getting far too simple to be truly useful for all but the most troglodytic mouth breathers.
Win8 will do well, IMO. It will come out coupled with touchscreens, on which it really does work well - certainly far better than 7. I'm going to get it just for the various improvements such as insanely quick boot times and a huge improvement to the taskbar's multi-screen usage. Do I care about the looks of the new start menu? Yes, but not enough for me to overlook the other improvements. Besides, someone, probably stardock, will modify Win8 to have a classic start menu again. Until then, I'll just use windows key+F.
If that's what people actually want what's wrong with that?
All the backend stuff in windows, the x86/ARM stuff, processes, multiprocessor features etc. are mostly irrelevant to the day to day user experience of 'how do I start the program I want to run?'. If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them.
No one is obliged to buy windows 8, if it's not what you want, don't buy it, and wait till they have a version that is what you want. (Or change OS's, which of course the big risk, as people don't have any desire to tolerate this sort of success-failure-success cycle MS has had going for a while).
No, they won't. People will just stick to windows 7 for a long time (like they did with XP). Even if windows 8 and 9 are complete bullshit people will still migrate to them when windows 7 support ends. Why? Because so much software is windows-only that no one will be able to move to linux or mac.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
So why would Microsoft care? I can think of one reason -- as has been pointed out by others, the more time people spend in a browser, the less they care about the underlying OS. When the user community is not dependent on a browser that's locked to a particular OS, the OS becomes less important, because you can run Chrome or Firefox or Opera on a lot of different platforms. Unlocking the browser from the OS is the first step -- causing a movement en-masse to a different operating system (or systems) is the next logical step. I would argue it is already happening.
So for the long term, if Microsoft isn't scared, they should be. I would expect over the next couple of years many attempts at embrace, extend, extinguish to get ...something... that everyone uses, locked into their one platform. I mean, how else are they going to compete?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I don't get it either, but I stopped wondering years ago.. I think it has something to do with most people being fucking stupid. While recently Firefox and Chrome have nice things, Opera also was the "underdog" when *no* other browser had *anything* on it. So, yeah. GG, interwebs :P
Internet Explorer. A technology developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, by NCSA staff programmer Eric Bina, improved by undergraduate (David Thompson, Marc Andreessen) and graduate computer science students, renamed Mosaic, was licensed by Spyglass (Spyglass Mosaic) and later licensed by Microsoft Corp. (Internet Explorer).
Yet again.
Microsoft Corp. had nothing to do at all with the development of the internet and neither the world wide web. They with little effort licensed a technology given their dollar reserves at the time. And true to form Microsoft Corp. could not and did not posses the necessary intelligence nor even comprehension to understand the technology which they had bought with their inflated dollars at the time.
Thus we have as exhibit A the Microsoft Lost Generation.
Who is the Father of the Microsoft Lost Generation?
LoL :D
I know this is slashdot but to quote that site as representative? why not the FSF's to get a bit of balance? Or the Firefox developers'? Actually I'm shocked that 15% of their visitors do use IE given the antipathy to Microsoft. When Google's stats show something similar then that will be another matter.
No one is obliged to buy windows 8
There are "strict" obligations and then there are practical obligations.
MSFT's Windows lock-in with the manufacturers means that you'll buy Windows if you buy a pre-built computer from anyone except tiny Linux shops. Or Apple.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
1 . consumer using IE
2 . ?????
3 . profit
I imagine its more important that it exists , then how many people use it.
Sure, 15% of that website's users. Most definitely not 15% of global market. That number is closer to 54% on the desktop. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/firefox-fights-back-holds-on-to-second-place-in-world-browser-shares/
Several apps we have *require* it. Ones we will use for the foreseeable future, and they have no plans on rewriting it. ( heavy OCX stuff )
Rather frustrating actually.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
People use IE in the business environment because it's the default and IT departments frown on (and in almost all cases prohibit) individuals from installing FF or Chrome.
Even though, since I telecommute and so have admin rights on my company-provided laptop, I've installed and primarily use FF, sometimes I still must use IE for some stupid intranet app or other that only works with IE.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
How well did that work out for vista?
I suspect that there will be a rush to get computers *without* windows 8 and then a lull until we see windows 9.
No one is obliged to buy windows 8
There are "strict" obligations and then there are practical obligations.
MSFT's Windows lock-in with the manufacturers means that you'll buy Windows if you buy a pre-built computer from anyone except tiny Linux shops. Or Apple.
Windows is next. These things take time. What do I mean? I'll answer the summary's question.
What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?
That karma is very, very real and eventually even fat stupid Americans catch on and figure out that you're abusing them. It just takes them a long time. Anyone with a fully developed conscience stopped giving Microsoft money 15 years ago when they realized what they would have been funding. The rest care about only their own convenience and jump ship when an alternative is obviously superior. One way or another the result is inevitable.
I agree, that for phones and slates it will make sense, whether or not those will take off enough for it to matter is harder to say.
I saw a beta of it run on a EEE netbook with 1G ram. It was crazy fast. Loaded office, outlook, explorer... boom boom boom. But the interface was from Star Trek TNG without the curves. Then there is this whole locking the machine to the OS business. Talk about turn off.
I stopped using windows years ago because everything was office office office. Most people type, spellcheck, then print/email. Or they make ugly powerpoints and the most advanced feature used is to import a graph from excel. This is not what MS should have based their entire company on; and if it truly was the core of the company they would have put office on Linux long ago.
I don't think MS knows what it is and while that is going on the Office section has mostly dominated.
To contrast it with Apple's success; They know they are iTunes. Google mostly knows it is searching mass amounts of data and ads. And facebook knows it is monkeys standing under the tree looking at the shiny thing.
So I suspect that the new Windows is a good idea at its core but it will end up soaking in a caustic bath of Office until it is brittle and smells funny.
Windows 9 will be an attempt to compensate for the Office induced stink by wrapping it in steel bands to reenforce the structure. I am willing to bet that if the OS programmers at MS were able to tell the Office people to bugger off and even go so far as to sandbox their whole suite that Windows might regain the crown. I was so happy when Firefox walled out crap from MS putting itself into FF. It is this sort of thinking that has dogged MS for over a decade.
I remember when NT was really popular with programmers and I think one of the main reasons was that it wasn't tripping over itself to push other MS products. They had designed it to be a server OS with a thin GUI and the office people left it largely alone.
I don't know if SharePoint is innovative or simple to manage, but it's pretty darned useful. Same with SQL Server: yes they bought it from Sybase, but have continued to add new features while seeing it dig deeper into corporate data centers.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
dude, this is gross.
I hope you clean your cache once a day at least, man.
This is like, basic hygiene.
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
If the next version of Windoze is going to be called Windows 9, what will happen in 86 more versions? Windows 95?
Well enough on the home-user front. Not so well in the Enterprise, which is why my 2yo corporate laptop runs XP Pro.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
How many web developers or people interested in web development use Internet Explorer?
Anybody who develops web sites intended to be used by the general public. Do you really want to turn away customers that use Internet Explorer with a site whose style sheet appears broken?
Compared to here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
StatCounter, W3Counter, and Wikimedia all report IE at ~30%, +/- a couple of percentage points. Only W3Schools has a 15% number.
That alone makes me dubious of its accuracy.
Probably would have saved the guy who fell off his bike during a protest ride against helmet laws.
Then again, that would have prevented him from earning a Darwin Award.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Evidence please? The end users that matter, the ones with the spending power in the consumer electronics industry, are the ones that don't mind learning a new interface. Because that's what they've recently had to do with smartphones, tablets and consoles. Windows 8 just won't bomb because of the reason you cite. It'll just an oddity of computing history that it was once dominated by a single paradigm from a single company, that no one was used to adapting to a new interface. That was the state of things until 2000s. Kids these days spend hours a day using computing devices, but might go a long time without ever sitting behind a PC. Aging mom n pop users and neckbearded IT relics will complain but Microsoft will inevitably sell millions of new tablets, laptops and touch enabled PCs with it to a market now conditioned to upgrading shiny handheld toys every 12 months or less.
Microsoft, if anything, is making necessary minimum changes if they want to remain relevant and keep hardware vendors happy.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The whole purpose of Internet Explorer was to destroy Netscape by cutting off their main source of revenue. Ever since Netscape ceased to be a threat, MicroSoft hasn't cared about IE.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
According to that chart IE hasn't been in the lead since 2008. However, NetApplications and others show IE with a much larger percentage. The HUGE gap in numbers make me doubt all of the numbers.
I wonder if that made them really mad.
The last two stories timothy posted were assertions of facts based on meaningless statistics (Objective-C Overtakes C++ based on TIOBE Index) and now this. Is it naive incompetence or deliberate provocation of a circlejerk? I'm not sure which is worse.
Obviously I don't have a study to point to, we'll see when it arrives, I'm guessing just as is anyone else here.
Microsoft could pull something truly awesome out of its hat and make windows 8 a must have for a lot of people, rough edges and all.
The thing with tablets, is that microsoft lost that battle already. If you want a consumer tablet you buy an ipad. The great selling point of android was not a walled garden, and runs flash, but now flash is dying. Windows tablets seem more like business devices, but who knows, there's not really anything compelling about them as content consumption devices that you can't do on android or ipad already.
Now again, i admit, I could be completely misreading the market here, but I would expect microsoft to really struggle on tablet traction.
Which takes us back to the desktop, and in that case I don't really see windows 8 taking off. In some ways it's the same problem as vista, but worse. What does windows 8 do for me? I'm not seeing a whole lot I get out of it (and it takes away my ability to watch TV on my PC), it's going to be confusing to use and add very little. So there's no real compelling reason to upgrade unless they pull some new features that are really worth having.
Maybe if they drop the price low enough, somebody might actually buy Microsoft Word instead of downloading LibreOffice for free.
Well, there are a lot of things that Microsoft can do now, but pretty well all of them come with the disadvantage of earning less money. Not that I would shed a tear.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Even if Windows 8 will be a trainwreck it will still impact IE marketshares and webmaster coding standards.
IE is now set on an annual update path with WIndows Update automatically for the grandmas and other users who do not like change.
When Windows 8 is released Windows 7 users will get automatically upgraded to IE 10. IE 10 from what I read is so good that even its javascript compliancy beats all the competitors. I will have to wait and see and talk to more professional hardcore javascript developers about this but if IE no longer sucks and is back in the game then it wont be worth the effort for users to upgrade.
IE 9 is a relatively good browser now too. Not great yet, but I use it for multimedia heavy sites with graphics because the hardware acceleration still beats FF and Chrome by a decent margin. For grandmas and office workers it is certainly worthy to upgrade to.
This wont necessarily be a bad thing as webmasters just have to leave the css tricks and hacks for corporate users who refuse to update old IE crying and screaming the whole way. My hope is if enough of us refuse to support it htey will upgrade to IE 10 as well as corporations leave XP behind for Windows 7 next year before EOL in early 2014.
http://saveie6.com/
It's almost as bad as using MidnightBSD.org. I just checked Google analytics and it's showing 54% use Firefox, 26.59% on chrome, 11.59% on safari, 7.78% on IE and 4.92% on Opera. Any site that caters to technically savvy people is a bad indicator of general population.
If we based this magic percentage on hits to my BSD project site, it would look even worse for Microsoft. It's just not fair to do so.
Interestingly 47% of visitors are using Windows on my site and the second highest number is Linux at 31%. Are we going to assume Linux has 30% marketshare in desktops now too?
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Could it be that Chrome prefetching is actually generating enough traffic to skew the result?
I once had a signature.
What a webmaster cares about is ugly hacks and weird sh*t that you have to do with IE 6,7,and 8 like not adding methods to elements in javascript, no pixel formatting, only using css properties on a per div basis etc.
IE 9 has just a few minor things if you get dirty and heavily into custom code but generally identical to everything else. IE 10 which will come out automatically acts like Chrome and FF like a real standard browser should act.
I care about IE 6 and 7 marketshare as they are ... no words to describe them. IE 8 sucks and has no HTML 5 or css 3 support at all due to its age of 3 years. All the comment boxes on slashdot do not even have curved edges and are squared with on IE 8 for crying out loud! Curved boxes have been w3c standard since like 2001.
http://saveie6.com/
Recently I saw a TV ad for Internet Explorer. I thought it was kinda strange that Microsoft (or any company) would have to spend that kind of money to promote something that's free and already included on your target market's computer.
oh come on, mod this one up
Bad for public areas. The sensor is very vulnerable to white out.
No where near as reliable as a ball mouse with the cover superglued in.
Mind you it generally makes for an extremely poor computing experience.
I agree. It seems, uniformly, that every OTHER version of Windows sucks, and the next is great. Windows 3.1 - great. Windows 95 - buggy. Windows 98 = great. Windows 2000 (or NT) = iffy. Skipping on, Vista = sucks hind titty. Windows 7 = love it. So Windows 8 will suck and many say it does from the reviews I have read. Not all are ready for just tablets or phones. They don't have the processing power some need.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them.
Because they need to demote Windows 7 / .NET & COM to essentially a hosted operating system to force change. They reason they need to force change is because they want to support much more diverse hardware like phones and tablets. And that means in particular moving to vector not bitmapped based interface standards which effects all windows applications.
Microsoft is fully aware the users don't want to change. The problem is that when they do want the change it will likely be far too late for Microsoft. That's the nature of disruptive technology. What users in effect want to do is slowly move away from Windows and towards phone/tablet based ARM systems. Microsoft is making a real play to stay in the consumer space and that means not letting consumers do a switch over.
Well enough on the home-user front. Not so well in the Enterprise, which is why my 2yo corporate laptop runs XP Pro.
But why is that? I work for the police department and they too are still using XP PRO. That has security holes u can drive a truck thru and MS has ended support. So why use it? Is it the price of new licenses or the fact of retraining for some users?
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
How well did that work out for vista?
In the consumer space? Fine. Consumers bought Vista at a good clip, not a great clip but there was no massive drop off. The resistance was from enterprise and no expects enterprise to like Windows 8.
People use IE in the business environment because it melds extremely nicely with Group Policy (which isn't a surprise, given they're both Microsoft tools). Firefox has half-baked third-party support for GP extensions and Chrome, while a bit better, seems mostly to be about how to control updates and less about the fine-control of the browser.
When one vendor provides a lot of niceties to make your job a heck of a lot simpler and easier and the competition doesn't, it's no surprise why IE still rules in corporate enterprise. Certainly helps that the OS and the browser are made by the same group of people.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
No one is obliged to buy windows 8
There are "strict" obligations and then there are practical obligations.
MSFT's Windows lock-in with the manufacturers means that you'll buy Windows if you buy a pre-built computer from anyone except tiny Linux shops. Or Apple.
Windows is next. These things take time. What do I mean? I'll answer the summary's question.
What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?
That karma is very, very real and eventually even fat stupid Americans catch on and figure out that you're abusing them. It just takes them a long time. Anyone with a fully developed conscience stopped giving Microsoft money 15 years ago when they realized what they would have been funding. The rest care about only their own convenience and jump ship when an alternative is obviously superior. One way or another the result is inevitable.
So what will these "fat stupid Americans" switch to? Linux? Or will Apple start selling machines at a reasonable price and achieve larger market share? Something else I am not aware of? Curious to know.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Internet explorer is the only browser that comes with windows and yet they still somehow manage to mess up so badly.
"I for one don't understand why they would really care that much."
Nobody will ever hear of Bing otherwise.
There are a few areas where Microsoft tablets could be compelling.
1) Enterprise tablets. Both Google and Apple don't even really try for enterprise they are gaining traction by accident.
2) Medical tablets. Most of the people who know how to design electronics for medical are windows OEMs. The Android OEMs don't have a clue, yet.
3) Tablets for sales / presentation.
4) Tablets as a way to consumer enterprise content i.e. light editing of office documents, citrix....
5) Educational tablets for schools that are already Windows centric.
etc...
oh come on, mod this one up
agreed
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
"If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them."
20 Years? 26 for me. I began with Windows 1.03 and I really don't like new crap.
First thing I always do with a new version is to disable all the visual gimmicks, like aero, menu shadings etc and install the classic scheme. Lately I also had to install utilities to get a decent menu.
Went to LibreOffice because of that damn Ribbon as well.
It's a fucking tool that I used for over a quarter century, I don't have the patience to get slowed down every couple of years because some young moron thinks some new gimmick is 'cool'.
Been using Win8 for a couple months, really like it.
Honestly, if someone finds a way to permanently disable Metro, then I'll buy Windows 8. It has some nice new features: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Metro may be exactly what most users want instead of a start menu. Look at the success of iOS for many not-so-smart users. You just move the screen around until you find the shiny icon with the name of the thing you want to use. Oh look.. a glossy button called "Words with Friends". I'll push that. And magically its full screen. No need to have to figure out confusing things like resizing the window or moving it around. Plus with one app only open at a time (except if you dock on the side bar) it removes all those distractions of multitasking. My mom will love this.
Power users can drop back into "real" desktop mode to do nerdy things like write code or something.
I usually go by the rule of threes for Microsoft. It's usually their third attempt at things that succeeds. Windows 3.0 was the first one that made traction. NT 4 was the third version of NT (3.1, 3.5x, 4.0) and the first that really got great traction. 98 SE was the third 9x and probably the best. XP SP2 was the third version of XP and where they finally got it right. It breaks down after that, I suppose, though you could sort of go with XP-Vista-7 in NT-based consumer OSes?
Incidentally, sometimes I wonder if I'm the only geek that never had major trouble with 95 (or at least, no more trouble than later 9x versions). It was a huge upgrade from 3.1 in almost every way.
So why use it?
Why not use it?
Security issues with Windows are not new. IT teams have been managing XP's foibles for a decade now. It's not like Vista/7 suddenly lifted the bar enough that they can reduce their efforts either.
The new OS doesn't do anything to improve productivity otherwise, so may as well not change.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Windows 8 will be a trainwreck. Too many changes for most users. The issue is windows 9 (whatever that will look like).
And everyone in Microsoft land will be so delighted that Windows 9 sucks just a bit less than Windows 8, that they won't mind the fact that the "Windows 9 Certified" program will prohibit OEM's from allowing the user to disable UEFI Secure Boot.
That way, when Windows 10 comes along, you won't have a choice.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It worked out pretty well. They sold at least 330 million copies. I would love for my software to be such a flop.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
This is true, I wish we could buy machines without a Microsoft tax. But anyway, I think that Microsoft is going to start losing more and more ground on the consumer front to tablets and cell phones. My wife doesn't even touch her laptop anymore and most people can replace their casual surfing and email with a tablet pretty easily. For the few times when you need to write a term paper you can use a desktop. A few weeks ago I went to an event at Google and out of about 100 people with laptops I saw 1 or two Windows laptops the rest were either MacBook pro's pr MacBook Air's. In the enterprise MS still has a lock on the desktop and for the most part email servers but things can change, just take a look at RIM.
"Don't Panic!"
OK, in 88 more versions will be Windoze 97
That's why Apple has iCloud. To lock you in further. It works for me!
-- Cheers!
Sounds like you should switch to Linux. It can be as much or as little as you want it to be.
"Don't Panic!"
I am still waiting for all the games I like to run on Apple or Linux. I think I still have to wait a very long time for that.
-- Cheers!
I wish I had points to give you, sharepoint is painful. Also the most useful features only work on IE with Windows.
"Don't Panic!"
Nice troll. Going from android 2.3 to 4.0 many of the icon/label options are now icon only - obscure icons at that. Concepts are useless, I already know what I want to do but the interface changed for the worse such that I now have to relearn basic crap all over again. Backwards. This is where usability is going. I like a sleek interface as much as the next geek, just not at the expense of productivity.
How do you figure IE9 fits into that?
I wish we could buy machines without a Microsoft tax.
You can, if you buy the parts from some place like newegg. The only hard part is getting the mobo secured in the case and wired correctly. Everything else is child's play.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
These ARE meaningless!
This is a sampling of browsers that just visit their site!!
The actual June numbers are:
IE (all versions) 54%
Firefox (all versions) 20%
Chrome (all versions) 19%
Safari (all versions) 5%
Opera (all versions) 2%
Comparing August 2011 to June 2012:
Month____________IE Firefox Chrome Safari Opera Other
August___2011 55.31% 22.57% 15.51% 4.64% 1.68% 0.29%
June_____2012 54.02% 20.06% 19.08% 4.73% 1.60% 0.51%
(Source: Net Market Share for June 2012, Desktops: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0&qptimeframe=M)
Yeah I was looking at that myself. Among nearly everybody I know, including die-hard apple fans, is that safari is the running joke of web browsers.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
"If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them."
20 Years? 26 for me. I began with Windows 1.03 and I really don't like new crap. First thing I always do with a new version is to disable all the visual gimmicks, like aero, menu shadings etc and install the classic scheme. Lately I also had to install utilities to get a decent menu. Went to LibreOffice because of that damn Ribbon as well.
It's a fucking tool that I used for over a quarter century, I don't have the patience to get slowed down every couple of years because some young moron thinks some new gimmick is 'cool'.
aaaaaaaaand.... GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
Well, if by stealing you mean buying for quite a lot of money, then sure.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
No one is obliged to buy windows 8, if it's not what you want, don't buy it
Huh? Where have you been for the last 20 years?
Try going into a computer shop this time next year. See if you can buy a new PC/Laptop without Windows 8*. Let us know how you get on.
(*) Unless it's a Mac, obviously...
No sig today...
How well did that work out for vista?
And ME
And 98 until they released "98SE"
They seem to step on their pecker with every other version of Windows... but the fact is all the crappy releases were just money grabs
98 should have been 98SE, ME should have been XP. Vista should have been 7.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
XP will receive security updates until April 8, 2014.
Windows 7 until January 14, 2020.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/lifecycle
Why use XP? Think about the Enterprise, with hundreds or thousands of machines in different departments. Applications that have not been updated to work with later tech, such as JInitiator (requires Jedi hacking to work on x64), websites that may only work with IE 6 or 7, in-house batch files / scripts, compatibility with older servers, and so on.
Training isn't much where I'm at - people can barely report what OS they work on ("Do you see the word 'Start' at the lower-left, or a circle?") and most just clickity-click on whatever app they need to run. Outlook, Office, and IE are more like an OS to them.
Sometimes it is just as simple as plopping the new OS on, USMT, map the drives, and done. But in a varied environment it gets somewhat hairier, with infinite support calls. Better to wait either until the 3rd parties catch up or until you can implement workarounds and research fixes and alternatives.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
or is it '00
[...] If they allow "the cloud" to reach the point when vendor lockin is not possible, Microsoft will have a very worrisome future. [...]
"The Cloud" is vendor lock-in. At least when done "right"
> Because they need to demote Windows 7 / .NET & COM to essentially a hosted
> operating system to force change. They reason they need to force change is because
> they want to support much more diverse hardware like phones and tablets. And that
> means in particular moving to vector not bitmapped based interface standards
> which effects all windows applications.
WTF??? Look, I agree that the desktop UI paradigm might suck on tablets+smartphones. That does *NOT* justify putting a tablet+smarthphone UI on desktop PCs, where it'll suck just as badly. Different horse for different courses, etc.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
> Win8 will do well, IMO. It will come out coupled with touchscreens,
> on which it really does work well - certainly far better than 7.
Oh boy, just what I need. Throw away the mouse. and stretch my arm out 2 feet to drag+drop stuff all the way across my 24 inch LCD screen. No thanks. You think people had carpal tunnel syndrome in the past, wait till this monstrosity takes over.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
"It's a fucking tool that I used for over a quarter century, I don't have the patience to get slowed down every couple of years because some young moron thinks some new gimmick is 'cool'.
aaaaaaaaand.... GET OFF MY LAWN!!!"
Forgot that line.:-) But on a new machine with the latest OS because the old one died, it's frustrating when you have to do a job real quick, let's say straighten something and you reach for your hammer and it has become a fucking nail-gun.
If that's what people actually want what's wrong with that?
Nothing really... but it kind of reminds me of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChahP31qh9k
and this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
Biggest reason you need GPO for IE is that its broken in the first place. Chrome and FF works out of the box, Internet Explorer needs hours on end of tinkering to work for us.
HTTP/1.1 400
Though I have no personal experience with 1.03 (only 1.01, 3.1, ...), I don't think that 1.03 had a start menu. It had a "File"-menu, but the purpose of that was completely different from the start menu, except that you could use it to turn off your computer with.
The start menu arrived in win95, released in 1994, which was about 18 years ago.
This is /., stop bragging about how long you have used stuff if you don't know it yourself.
"If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them."
20 Years? 26 for me. I began with Windows 1.03 and I really don't like new crap.
First thing I always do with a new version is to disable all the visual gimmicks, like aero, menu shadings etc and install the classic scheme. Lately I also had to install utilities to get a decent menu.
Went to LibreOffice because of that damn Ribbon as well.
It's a fucking tool that I used for over a quarter century, I don't have the patience to get slowed down every couple of years because some young moron thinks some new gimmick is 'cool'.
But the start menu was introduced in Windows 95. (To never ending jokes about "to shut down, press the 'Start' button and...")
To the moderator that marked this -1; While i disagree with the parent, there is nothing they said that called for a down mod. Modding down a post that you disagree with is not moderation, it is censorship. This makes you a scumbag.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
Windows 1.03 ?? Did that even exist ? I thought the oldest was Windows 3.1 .
Oh, that summary hurts me in so many ways.
- They're at 16%. I know that's "almost 15%", but why not just type 16%? It's not like you saved any time!
- Stiff competition from Apple? Safari is at the same 4% market share it's been at for several years.
- Implications for the Future of Microsoft? I'm sure dropping to third place in the browser market is really going to be the straw that broke Ballmer's back...
Absolute bullshit. I can say this from actual experience in corporate-level I.T. work (got out of it though, thank goodness) and am not just speculating on stuff I've read on the web. Now if you aren't just talking out of your ass and have some real issues with IE, I'm open to hearing them.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
No, the oldest one ever released was Windows 1.01, released somewhen end of 1985. Windows 2.0 came end of 1987, and was replaced soon by Windows 2.1 (and its siblings Windows/286 and Windows/386) in 1988. Support for Windows 2.x endet in 2001(!).
Anecdotes are fun. I know no Mac users that don't use Safari.
Personally, I like it, but it has a couple shortcomings. Unfortunately, Chrome isn't as good on OS X and is missing a few key features, so it's not really an option at this time. Safari 6 (using the beta right now) brings some improvements.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
That way, when Windows 10 comes along, you won't have a choice.
or you could simply build your own pc from parts and say F U to the manufacturers and Microsoft
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
yeah, because vendors like DELL tried to sell linux desktops and that was a HUGE SUCCESS. And HP tried to create their own OS. That was just about as successful as the linux desktop.
The 'how do I start the program I want to run' paradigm is wrong for the vast majority of people, and not what people are coming to expect from their PCs. Admittedly, the /. crowd might be atypical
They want something that gets out of the way and allows them to do what they wanted to do. I'm running Win8, and after a week of use my view is that it does that better than any other UI.
Full disclosure: I now work for Microsoft.
Or a package manager, choose a browser from a list, hit install, done. No messing with CLI or FTP.
It's not the fault of browser makers that MS seem to have stuck their basic functionality in the 80s (rcp? telnet? no ssh? ftp but no sftp or rsync? no package downloader/manager? etc etc).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
For a desktop sure, but for a laptop your options are much more limited. You can get something from Zareason , system76, or one of a few Dell's but other than that you are pretty much stuck. I had to grab an Asus laptop from Best Buy (shudder) last year because mine died 2 days before I was leaving the country so I didn't have much choice other than buy one that had mostly Intel parts so I would have a fair chance of it working with Ubuntu. I tried getting a refund from Asus but it fell on deaf ears.
"Don't Panic!"
That karma is very, very real and eventually even fat stupid Americans catch on and figure out that you're abusing them. It just takes them a long time. Anyone with a fully developed conscience stopped giving Microsoft money 15 years ago when they realized what they would have been funding. The rest care about only their own convenience and jump ship when an alternative is obviously superior. One way or another the result is inevitable.
So what will these "fat stupid Americans" switch to? Linux? Or will Apple start selling machines at a reasonable price and achieve larger market share? Something else I am not aware of? Curious to know.
Apple is already achieving a larger market share. Right now the question is: how high can they go?
They need a mobile browser to destroy iOS and Android (the current Windows phones have IE9 based browsers). It's hardly realistic but it's how you fit IE9 into that argument.
Stupid flounders!
It's sad that so many "smart" people are using Chrome that has so many privacy concerns. The following information is from Wikipedia but you can find this information all over. Google fanboys need not reply.
1) Suggest - All text, searches, and URLs typed into the address bar are sent to Google
2) Downloads - Chrome sends the URL and IP of the host and other meta data, such as the file’s hash and binary size, to Google when downloading files
3) Page not found - All URLs and text typed into the address bar (Upon receiving "Server not found" response) is sent to Google
4) Google Update (Windows) - Information about how often Chrome is used, details about the OS and Chrome version.
5) Bug tracker - Details about crashes and failures (including information about the machine and software being used)
6) clientID - Unique identifier along with logs of usage metrics and crashes.
7) Installation - Randomly generated token included in installer. Used to measure success rate of Google Chrome once at installation.
8) RLZ identifier - Encoded string, according to Google (if you trust Google), contains non-identifying information how Chrome was downloaded and its install week, and is used to measure promotional campaigns. Google provides the source code to decode this string.
This is the reason for products such as SRWare Iron that remove all the privacy concerns from Chromium:
"Google's Web browser Chrome thrilled with an extremely fast site rendering, a sleek design and innovative features. But it also gets critic from data protection specialists , for reasons such as creating a unique user ID or the submission of entries to Google to generate suggestions. SRWare Iron is a real alternative. The browser is based on the Chromium-source and offers the same features as Chrome - but without the critical points that the privacy concern.
We could therefore create a browser with which you can now use the innovative features without worrying about your privacy."
To me, it's just disappointed at the sheer number of sheeple who couldn't care less if Google tracks everything they do on the internet. Which also gives support to them tracking everyone else - including their own family members. Oh wait... but Google can be totally trusted, right? I mean, they would never do anything evil with all that data since they are an advertising corporation who's sole purpose is to make money. Ya, sure.
Give the customers what they want? whatever next! Democracy? Its just not the American way!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yeah, and it was so bad that I've got a bunch of "old" Vista laptops that were discarded by their owners in favor of them buying a new machine with Windows 7. There was nothing wrong with the hardware. Just the OS. In some cases I downgraded people's machines to XP. In other cases they just gave me the hardware because they didn't want it. Vista was so bad, and the market position so dominant, that Microsoft drove sales with it. People refreshed their machines much sooner than they probably would have if Vista wasn't a piece of crap. It's like selling to drug addicts or something.
I wonder what's going to happen if Windows 8 turns out to be another disaster?
IE7 is down to 1.4% according to StatCounter; check the dropdown at the bottom. Presumably even IE6 is down even further. There are now more Opera users than IE7 users.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
That argumentation may have worked years ago, but let's see some proof perhaps? It's a bit cheap saying 'IT frowns on IE' and leaving it at that.
If IE share is dropping so dramatically, wouldn't it be coming mostly from corporate PC's no longer using it? (and many people switching from their already less powerful Netbook to an iPad running apps designed by/for the company? it's a growing trend in many of the companies we have as client (as an ERP consultancy firm))
Life is great! (as told by Lady Susan)
Just to add to you're point, I literally just bought a laptop from System76 that came with Ubuntu pre-installed.
It works great. I do have one problem, which may be my fault more than the machines. My older other laptop is an HP that came with Windows XP, was upgraded to Vista, broke horribly crashing and blue screens just about every day, then had Linux Mint installed and it's run with no issues for the last 5 years. It's primarily my MineCraft/Media server now, which seems to absorb all of the memory on the machine. I was able to get some games I had bough from GOG to run on a XP VMware installation on the old machine. The same games will not run on an XP VirtualBox installation on the new machine. I've only had the new laptop for a week, but I suspect it's one of two issues. It could be differences between VirtualBox and VMWare that are causing the issues. Or it could possibly be the cheapy Intel graphics card that came with the new machine. I won't know for sure until I have a chance to install VMWare and try running the same games under that instead of VirtualBox.
Long rambling point short, System76 is a great place to get a Linux pre-installed laptop if you're trying to avoid getting one with Windows preloaded.
I run 3 sites, each catering to a different audience
site #1: IE has 42.6%, FF has 19.6%, Chrome has 15.4%
site #2: FF has 33.8%, IE has 26.4, Chrome has 21.6%
site #3: FF has 23.8%, Chrome has 20.2%, IE has 9.8% (the bulk on this site were web crawlers)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
and eventually even fat stupid Americans catch on and figure out that you're abusing them
So what will these "fat stupid Americans" switch to? Linux? Or will Apple start selling machines at a reasonable price and achieve larger market share?
most likely we'll say "we're tired of being flogged by microsoft, lets go to apple and get caned instead!". we americans have a high capacity for allowing corporations to abuse us (maybe not those of us who read /. but the average american just moves from abuser to abuser)
I'm currently playing Mass Effect 2 on wine on Linux, I've played plenty of other games with minimal problems.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
As most people, I don't want to have to fiddle with different programs to get something running on my computer. It should just work.
-- Cheers!
Logitech M-BA47 forever!
I prefer a mouse with a usable middle mouse button, and from a company that doesn't crap on Linux users.
TBH, I prefer PS/2 for both mouse and keyboard. No "best effort" and unpredictable latency like USB, no extra layers of software to go through, and no need to turn on "legacy USB support" in the BIOS.
FTFY
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I just released our corporate Windows XP SP3 image, updated with drivers and patches for Ivy Bridge laptops that were released a month ago.
That being said, we're steaming along in our transition to Windows 7, but that won't be complete until after Windows 8 ships.
As far as enterprise customers go, Vista didn't exist, and Windows 7 only exists starting late last year, due to all the infrastructure and application changes necessary before a successful migration can occur.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
My company actually has a "browser governance committee" - don't get me started - but they meet every once in a while and go over the different browser options, and meet with internal developers to see what browsers work with our deployed systems. And then they choose to standardize on IE because we have shedloads of crap coded with ActiveX and other things that only work in IE on Windows.
That's your vendor lock-in.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I usually go by the rule of threes for Microsoft. It's usually their third attempt at things that succeeds. Windows 3.0 was the first one that made traction. NT 4 was the third version of NT (3.1, 3.5x, 4.0) and the first that really got great traction. 98 SE was the third 9x and probably the best. XP SP2 was the third version of XP and where they finally got it right. It breaks down after that, I suppose, though you could sort of go with XP-Vista-7 in NT-based consumer OSes?
Incidentally, sometimes I wonder if I'm the only geek that never had major trouble with 95 (or at least, no more trouble than later 9x versions). It was a huge upgrade from 3.1 in almost every way.
Looking at it again, perhaps u r right. Did not know 3.1 was part of NT. NT 4 was also Windows 2000? Never used Windows 95 - skipped by it to 98. It crashed sometimes but not near as much as 3.1. Thanks for your insight.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Then buy a mac ;)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
When one vendor provides a lot of niceties to make your job a heck of a lot simpler and easier and the competition doesn't, it's no surprise why IE still rules in corporate enterprise. Certainly helps that the OS and the browser are made by the same group of people.
I don't work for an IT company. I work for a broadcaster. We use tools which help us get stuff on air, that could be anything from FCP to putty to chrome to gmail.
"Corporate IT" used to get in the way, until we took things back to the business. IT decisions are now led by the business, to make the business's job "a heck of a lot simpler and easier".
So why use it?
Why not use it?
Security issues with Windows are not new. IT teams have been managing XP's foibles for a decade now. It's not like Vista/7 suddenly lifted the bar enough that they can reduce their efforts either.
The new OS doesn't do anything to improve productivity otherwise, so may as well not change.
I guess you are correct. They need a cogent reason to make the switch and pay the extra licensing fees. I do like the file handling in 7 better and it is faster. But a large part of the slowness at work is network-related, not OS related.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
I'm not sure how how the average consumer gets "caned" by Apple. They buy a machine/tablet - it works. If anything goes wrong with it in the first year short of abuse, they get it fixed or replaced. For a nominal sum, they can extend that policy to 3 years. On price, it's been proven by lack of competing devices with significantly lower prices that they're reasonably priced, whether some on /. think so or not. (We're not talking lower quality or capability hardware, but an apples to apples comparison, pardon the pun)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I have a Mac but most games only run on Windows. Luckily you see more and more adventure games that are also released for Mac, for the same price.
-- Cheers!
I am still waiting for all the games I like to run on Apple or Linux. I think I still have to wait a very long time for that.
Amen Brother
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Vista had two big INITIAL quality issues, and the UI was not one of them. Vista had poor driver quality issues at launch, including NVIDIA driver issues which resulted in over 30 percent of the BSoD problems. Between that, and it being more RAM hungry(2GB being the minimum you SHOULD have had), plus needing a bit of tuning, that is why there were so many performance issues in the first six months after launch.
People who had AMD based machines with AMD/ATI graphics and 2GB or more of RAM had very few problems with the changes in Vista.
Now, the big issue with Windows 8 is not the stuff behind the scenes, but is more about the doubt about if Metro is an acceptable UI for the desktop. What works best on a phone for a UI(not talking about the fundamental OS the UI sits on top of) is NOT going to work as well on a desktop. Even the idea of pushing touch screens on the desktop fails to understand that people will NOT want to be reaching out to touch a screen when they have a keyboard and mouse. It is all about controls, and a touch screen does not work as well on the desktop as it does on a hand-held device.
XP will receive security updates until April 8, 2014. Windows 7 until January 14, 2020.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/lifecycle
Why use XP? Think about the Enterprise, with hundreds or thousands of machines in different departments. Applications that have not been updated to work with later tech, such as JInitiator (requires Jedi hacking to work on x64), websites that may only work with IE 6 or 7, in-house batch files / scripts, compatibility with older servers, and so on.
Training isn't much where I'm at - people can barely report what OS they work on ("Do you see the word 'Start' at the lower-left, or a circle?") and most just clickity-click on whatever app they need to run. Outlook, Office, and IE are more like an OS to them.
Sometimes it is just as simple as plopping the new OS on, USMT, map the drives, and done. But in a varied environment it gets somewhat hairier, with infinite support calls. Better to wait either until the 3rd parties catch up or until you can implement workarounds and research fixes and alternatives.
You are correct. Guess I don't know much about Enterprise. But there are legacy apps and web pages that only run on certain OS's or flavors of IE. So about the time we get to Windows 9 they might change to 7??? J/K. Understand now the difficulties. And did not know MS supported XP until 2014.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
So what will these "fat stupid Americans" switch to? Linux? Or will Apple start selling machines at a reasonable price and achieve larger market share? Something else I am not aware of? Curious to know.
A lot of them are already switching. That's what this whole "Post-PC" thing is about. Meaning that some of those "something else's" are iOS and Android.
While PCs are probably not going to go the way of the minicomputer anytime soon, there are a lot of cases where being tethered to a big, clunky desktop or laptop isn't what people want and they're picking op alternatives in droves. I'm probably spending 50% less time on a PC myself and I'm not exactly a hipster - just someone who prefers to read email, browse the web and RSS new, and do other things at my convenience instead of the desktop's.
However, if the desktop loses its prominence, people are going to lose their enthusiasm for desktop OS's. Which, in fact, is one reason that Windows 8 is so attentive to tablet usage - Microsoft can read the writing on the wall.
The question, of course, being whether Windows on a tablet can overcome being a late arrival behind several other successful platforms.
Strange, any app I open comes up as a full screen app without needing to move things around, unless I change it after the initial launch.
That is lock-in caused by the idiots who write for ActiveX. Anyone else would have gone with something else that allows for some choice in browsers.
I agree wholeheartedly with Albert Einstein :)
-- Cheers!
Try going into a computer shop this time next year. See if you can buy a new PC/Laptop without Windows 8
There are currently shops doing good business selling new PCs with XP. I'm sure there will still be around next year.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Why not use it?
Didn't GP just say, "That has security holes u can drive a truck thru and MS has ended support." Those are great reasons not to use it.
I am still waiting for all the games I like to run on Apple or Linux. I think I still have to wait a very long time for that.
You could cut the wait down by liking less games.
Fear is the mind killer.
well, theres the whole "walled garden" thing, and there's apple's tendency to simply stop supporting legacy hardware (which i agree with wholeheartedly, but can be considered an abusive practice), and theres the "apple tax" on desktops and laptops (sure, we can debate the merits of apple's "quality", or their warranties, but at the end of the day, i can buy an equally spec'd machine with windows on it for roughly half of what i would pay for a mac, and do as much, if not more on it than i could on a mac. and if i build it myself, i can probably do it even cheaper.). my comment wasnt a comparison of ms vs apple, but simply a statement of how we, as americans, have a tendency to move from one abusive product provider to another, and we laud how great the new abuser is until we get tired of the way they beat us, and we move again to a different form of abuse.
disable all the visual gimmicks, like aero
Enjoy your lack of vsync.
I am still waiting for all the games I like to run on Apple or Linux. I think I still have to wait a very long time for that.
Some of us indie game devs hear you loud and clear, mate. No Wine wrappers for my code -- Native Linux support all the way.
What's odd is that it takes no extra effort code wise, and only a little effort testing wise to support Lin/Win/Mac -- Just choose a cross platform toolchain from the outset -- Oh, I think I see the AAA's problem...
IMHO, there's no reason for new titles to ignore marketshare (money) needlessly. More studios are coming around to this line of thinking..... Crap! I better hurry and get my games done before then!
Microsoft who? Don't they make game consoles or something?
Mod parent up; from the page itself: "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. [...] These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser. Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over many years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends."
So, w3schools showed IE at ~34% in 2010, so perhaps in a few more years, it will be down to 17% more broadly.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I'm hopeful that game companies will see the light and support macs as well. Once they do, they should be able to add Linux support pretty easily also. I think this will be driven in no small part by the change over to tablets for a significant chunk of the semi-casual users, which currently means pretty much iPad. Breaking the windows hegemony, once deemed as likely as aliens landing in New York, now appears to be an achievable feat in the near future, and we'll all be better for it.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Microsoft's goose is cooked anyway. People do 80% of their online work with their smartphones and live the other 20% on a tablet.
The only people who NEED a full blown PC with Windows are people who.... You know, I'm not sure anymore. Developers? IT people? Engineers? Video editors? Beats me.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Hardly seems like a disaster for Microsoft. Everybody will still use Microsoft. People will just skip that "upgrade."
Indeed, as I said I find more and more adventure games for the Mac these days. That's a trend that has just started to develop and I like it a lot. Most of these games are indeed made by indies :).
-- Cheers!
I would say that's a valid point: mobile probably was the motivation to overhaul IE for IE9. But it's not fair to then say MS hasn't cared about IE since Netscape failed.
well, theres the whole "walled garden" thing
Yes, it's there for iDevices, and it's a good thing in that segment. Note how well things work together versus the disaster that's Android. For those that want to take over their own devices, they can jailbreak. For the vast user base, however, that appears to not be a concern.
and there's apple's tendency to simply stop supporting legacy hardware (which i agree with wholeheartedly, but can be considered an abusive practice)
Simply stop supporting hardware that's more than 5 years old is abusive? Seriously? Have you checked the Android/Windows device support history of late? It's down to 6 months or less in some cases. Apple is still supporting 3G iPhones, which are over 3 years old, although they cannot update to the next version of iOS, that doesn't mean they're not supported. As for the PowerPC and initial Intel Core systems, they were supported for 5+ years (actually may still be supported - my Intel Core system still is, although I don't know if it will run Lion. Heck, my 7-8 year old nano is still "supported" in that it works with everything I have.
and theres the "apple tax" on desktops and laptops (sure, we can debate the merits of apple's "quality", or their warranties, but at the end of the day, i can buy an equally spec'd machine with windows on it for roughly half of what i would pay for a mac, and do as much, if not more on it than i could on a mac. and if i build it myself, i can probably do it even cheaper.).
I used to believe that. I don't anymore. I built a hack, actually, it's a hex-core (Intel 980x). With Win7 would be around $2300 with a single HD and the same RAM. The Mac Pro equivalent would run about $3K for the same configuration, true, but that includes a faster processor, so it's not quite apples to apples yet. With the same processor, it'll run $3K as well. I'll also note that my case is much cheaper, and the power supply, while a decent one, may or may not be as good as what Apple uses. I also don't have the ability to upgrade to a dual socket system like I would with the Mac Pro. I wouldn't be surprised if the analysis of laptops against a Dell, IBM, or Asus would reveal the same comparisons I did across the past 6 years and 3 laptop purchases, all of which came out surprisingly in favor of Apple being cheaper than their competitors for the same equipment, and that's not even counting the extra software you need to purchase on Windows to reach parity.
my comment wasnt a comparison of ms vs apple, but simply a statement of how we, as americans, have a tendency to move from one abusive product provider to another, and we laud how great the new abuser is until we get tired of the way they beat us, and we move again to a different form of abuse.
So far, no one except a few hardcore Apple haters believe Apple is abusing them. They may not like everything about an Apple product, but abuse would be something different. I'd argue Android users are getting abused some, but nothing like the abuse Windows Phone adopters are getting. Both of those are buying products with 2 year contracts and having support dropped less than 9 months later (for Android on average) and almost on initial sale (for the Lumia 900).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Great news. However, corporate users still love these dinosaurs as corporate sites typically do not use Statcounter. IE 8 while not as picky still has many issues and many corporations who have learned to lock down their browsers for 10 years will be using that with Windows 7 until 2020 until support ends.
It is far from over but great that you can now ignore IE 6 for all but hte most corporate users and by this time next year ignore it as they will be about done with the transition to Windows 7.
http://saveie6.com/
But the start menu was introduced in Windows 95. (To never ending jokes about "to shut down, press the 'Start' button and...")
And now it will be "How do you shut the bleeping thing off??". Definitely progress. :-P
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Well as the guy that has to work on the machines just let me say that having an "extra browser" even if you never use it is a nice thing to have. I don't know how many times I've had a customer screw up their main browser somehow and was able to walk them through fixing it by uninstalling it and using IE to download the latest version to fix the problem. It of course doesn't happen as often as it did during the days of XP but it does happen so having an extra browser is nice. Of course they could have the same effect with that browser selection screen the EU mandated, just make an easy way for the customer to call that back up if things go wrong so its not like you'd HAVE to have IE, but as long as its there it does make a good backup.
That said the biggest users of IE has been and probably will be corporate. Corporate generally prefer timetables and life cycles and that's something the other browsers simply haven't been on board with. Mozilla finally gave the corps ESR release but after burning everyone with their "We're not gonna support old versions" stupidity they probably burnt that bridge and the only support they had for GPOs was third party anyway. The others have never seemed to care about business users so in the end all the businesses have is IE. So even if it dies out completely for the home users I doubt business will be giving up IE since its the only one that supports the way they like to do things.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Simply not true go read the myriad articles on technet dealing with Pre SP1 blue screens on Vista. There are a ton and it's BS to blame them all on Nvidia. There were tons of BSOD problems with Pre Sp1 vista and tons of application compatibility issues as well. If you took the plunge on the initial Vista release you mostly just got frustration as your reward.
And that means in particular moving to vector not bitmapped based interface standards which effects all windows applications.
Windows has effectively moved to vector based interface standards when WPF was included out of the box in Vista.
The Windows 3.1 most people knew was not part of NT, but Microsoft named its first server OS "Windows NT 3.1" to keep the version numbers the same. NT4 came before Windows 2000 by a few years. Windows 2000 was actually NT5, though Microsoft had changed their naming convention by then so it wasn't marketed under that name.
Yes, Corporate is different. And definitely isn't the same as looking at W3Schools. W3Schools is for the newbie webdeveloper.
The folks at NetMarketShare (who count marketshare by visitors):
Internet Explorer 54.02%
Firefox 20.06%
Chrome 19.08%
Safari: 4.73%
Opera: 1.60%
Other: 0.51%
http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=0
They also claim IE6 has a bigger marketshare than IE7:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 5.92%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 3.10%
http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0
Statcounter (who count marketshare by pageviews):
Chrome 34.61%
Firefox 5+ 21.75%
(it does not tell us about Firefox 4 users)
Firefox 3.6 1.22%
(it does not tell us about earlier versions of Firefox)
IE6 0.46%
IE7 1.05%
IE8 11.55%
IE9 17.03%
New things are always on the horizon
Your claim is debatable (and I disagree; IE9 is conservative in its adoption of emerging standards, but otherwise competitive in existing standards), but note that I was responding to the claim that MS doesn't "care about" IE, which does not necessarily depend on "modernness".
Hmm, what are the major changes for the average user?
I'm assuming there will continue to be a Windows Classic theme, possibly a Windows Aero Classic theme.
...to realise that IE just sucks?
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
Microsoft is compelling in these areas? Let's see:
1. Enterprise tablets.
Superficially, you are correct. Apple is *not* enterprise friendly, it just has enough gloss to be almost workable. However, the real selling point for a Windows tablet is office and... do you really want to write word docs on a tablet? Or create a power point presentation? Tablets have turned out differently than I expected and are being used more for casual computing. Apple's mail client is at least as good as any MS offering, the web browser is competent and, outside of niches, that covers corporate use. Office isn't really a good fit for a tablet.
The important thing for enterprise use is management, but Microsoft will have to convince an entrenched user base of iPad/Android users that they must start over with Windows tablets. Without a compelling case to sweeten the pot (like Office would have been when tablets were still new) I think they'll have difficulty getting traction. Will they get sales? Certainly. Substantial? Probably. There are plenty of places that will buy it because it has the MS brand on it. But significant market share? That I'm less sure of. There just isn't that compelling of a reason.
2. Medical tables
Most are Windows OEMs. Says you. Possibly true, I haven't bothered to check. I do know there are medical apps for the iPad, however. If your right about the synergy this could well be a *niche* market for a windows tablet.
3. Sales / Presentation
Compelling in what way? You just state a possible sales point for a tablet without giving any indication of why someone would choose a MS made tablet over Apple or Android.
4. Consumer enterprise content
Really? Light editing, etc., is already done on Apple devices and, I can only assume, on Android ones. There is nothing compelling about a MS made tablet here.
5. Education tablets for schools that are windows centric
Why? Apple's tablet interoperates with OS X and Windows just fine. Were you trying to re-use the enterprise argument? I fail to see any compelling argument here. As a windows-centric university that has been busy uprooting Apple computers for the last ten years we have had wide spread adoption of the iPad.
So... there *may* be an enterprise management issue that helps MS sell a few tablets (#1), there may be a medical tablet niche market (#2). None of your other examples hold any water at all.http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/08/2350247/internet-explorer-market-share-drops-to-almost-15#
Microsoft may be boldly donning the tablet interface for all devices, regardless of suitability, but all it looks like is a garish attempt to commit hara-kiri.
(No, I don't think MS is going to die any time soon, but it does look like they are going to continue to bleed with no end to the haemorrhaging in sight.)
...(and arguing about how trustworthy the stats are).
Has anyone else considered that this now means that no one browser rules any more. This is a good thing! Someone above posted the Wikipedia browser share link (this), and basically Chrome/IE/Firefox/Safari are all roughly equal (my guess on Safari is probably more Apple's portable iOS devices than OS X). This means that there are three web engines competing healthily (with webkit in the lead), and it's forcing all of them to be standards compliant.
(Also, yay for Firefox rising from Netscape's ashes just in time to stop the one-browser-rules-all scenario we nearly had with IE, and making it possible for other browers to exist...)
I think the thing you are missing is the connections with Windows based software. Literally millions of applications that do not yet have any sort of tablet interface. 5 more years and the important ones all will, but right now today I can't do enterprise applications on my tablet. For example right now EMC and TSG are developing initial Enterprise Content Management viewing solutions for tablets. Essentially all of the fortune 1000 have multiple ECMs and no one but Windows has interaction software for even a substantial fraction. The enterprise applications on Apple tablets are so far rather light.
As for sales, the advantage is integration with Windows sales tools: CRM / Sales management, existing presentations, ordering system.... As for Apple integrating with Windows, I don't see it and I own the iPad3.
And that's over and above the manageability arguments.
I would say that point would be when those who do not mind a "walled garden" have all bought a machine.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
If I remember correctly my M-BA47 came with a "USB-to-PS/2" adapter. I'm guessing its electronics are PS/2 compatible.
As for the unusable middle mouse button, I use it so rarely that most of the time I don't even remember it's there.
Besides, which company out there makes good mouses and doesn't crap on Linux users?
The Windows 3.1 most people knew was not part of NT, but Microsoft named its first server OS "Windows NT 3.1" to keep the version numbers the same. NT4 came before Windows 2000 by a few years. Windows 2000 was actually NT5, though Microsoft had changed their naming convention by then so it wasn't marketed under that name.
Thanks for the history. Always interested in it, especially in computing. I never knew that.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Try installing and configuring the 3D acceleration for Virtualbox via the settings and virtiualbox add-on's. Also make sure you have given the VM sufficient video memory.
"Don't Panic!"
Oh, and also most games from gog.com will run fine in wine.
"Don't Panic!"
That would be because they wanted "computers" and those machines were loaded with Vista.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
They had the technology. They haven't worked it out end to end on the ecosystem. Here are some very recent examples on the Asus zen: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5843/asus-zenbook-prime-ux21a-review/4
If things get even weirder like on the Macbook retina you can see the same sorts of problems with Windows 7 itself:
http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2116#1
I may be missing something, but what sorts of problems do you see on those screenshots? Even then 200% one looks fine to me. Upscaled bitmaps don't look neat, of course, but I don't see any artifacts.
Right, but you have to consider any sales relative to expectations and competition, in the case of vista they're competing with XP. And then windows 7.
How many people do you know that raced to get vista when 7 was on the horizon, how many people are upgrading to vista now that it's 'settled' or whatever term you want to use.
Sort of....
It defaults to metro, and has a classic mode that full screen programs switch into, but it doesn't really behave well doing that (or at least the preview I played with didn't play nice doing that).
And of course, no start button.
By itself I actually think metro is a good idea. Most users that I encounter don't really understand programs versus data, and they just have everything as an icon on their desktop. Metro goes straight to the heart of that, but it's still a radical shape up with a lot of inconsistent design, so I expect most people will fear change, and hide in a corner until windows 9.
Take for example the PCVantage screen shot ( http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/ASUS/ZenbookPrime/UX21A/pcmarkvantagescaling.jpg )
You can see the fonts are actually clipped unable to fit into the box at all.
Or on the retina one ( http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2116/200pct4.png ). Look at the size of the text in the screen from adobe relative to the text in the address bar and the tab.
If you read the link, you would see that they exceeded their own expectations by 130 million copies. The hate for vista is much stronger on slashdot than it is in the real world.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Oh, I misunderstood. I've read your phrase "problems with Win7 itself" as referring to problems with stock OS UI. Third-party apps, yeah, those are still hit and miss. That said, those that are written WPF or Silverlight (and, obviously, the new Metro stuff) should all scale correctly by default.
There are problems in 1st party apps too. For example one of the setting box in an IE 8 wizard doesn't scale properly. But if someone wanted to say that these are getting few enough to just consider them bugs rather than make broader claims I could live with that.
Oddly enough I installed VMWare on my Linux Mint machine because I the game I was trying to run under Wine kept crashing. However after reading your comment I decided to try running it under Wine on my new machine and it seems to work fine. So I have to run it under VMWare on one machine and I can run under wine on the other. I might try getting the 3D acceleration for virtualbox anyway in case I get something that doesn't run under wine. Thanks for the suggestions.
That's my opinion, but unfortunately I don't get to choose what our vendors coded in years ago.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.