Slashdot Mirror
Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share While Windows 8 Passes 1%
An anonymous reader writes "Just three months ago, we reported how Windows 7 had finally overtaken Windows XP in terms of market share. Now it's time to see how long it takes Windows 8 to succeed its predecessors. Between October to November, Windows XP fell to 39.82 percent while Windows 8 jumped to 1.09 percent."
I wonder if win8 will ever pass the xp market share
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Finally!
I can Photoshop Angry Birds! You don't know how I've been missing the feature to be able to run Angry Birds AND full blown photoshop, and all for the bargain price of $999.99!
Plus I get to use Active Directory, letting me leverage my work network for printing out all those Word documents on the exciting ribbon interface.
Sometimes on a cold morning, I miss the warmth of a Pentium, I'd sacrifice some of my battery to make, say, some sort of leg warmer, maybe even with a fan to blow the warm air! If only somebody would make me one of those tablet thingies with a lap warmer, I'd be happy!
...in virtual machines, because honestly, everything Vista and above is so freakin' huge.
And to what benefit all that resource suckage adds up to, I'm still not sure.
--
BMO
I support a lot of XP machines and in general the owners still love the OS because they are familiar with it. It's going to be around for a long, long time. I predict marketshare will continue dropping as it has until it reaches about 10% where it'll stabilize for a couple years despite being completely unsupported, losing perhaps 1-2% per year after that until completely dropping off the radar.
MS is in a unique position with their OS because in general all new PCs ship with the newest version of Windows. So they can force Windows 8 into the market just by refusing to license it to OEMs for default installs and then waiting long enough for consumers to upgrade their hardware. That takes years, but as we saw with Windows 7 it's a predictable and regular process.
The only question is, will MS stick to their guns and force this paradigm shift, or will they relent like they did with Vista and make Windows 8 a short-lived intermediate OS for whatever comes next? Maybe the next version of Windows will see a return to a more classic desktop paradigm similar to Windows 7, with metro being entirely optional. Maybe the next version will split into two, metro being aimed at consumer and tablet hardware and a Windows 7 style OS to keep corporate users happy. Sadly, I think the most likely outcome will be the first one. MS isn't going to relent. This is what they want their OS to be and that's the last word. "Corporate world, you better get used to it. You know you can't ditch Windows, Office, and Exchange." They're betting on the pain of switching to Linux or OS X (which strangely could now provide a more familiar experience to Windows users than MS's newest offering) being worse than the pain of learning this new family of software. And I think they'll get away with it just by shear momentum. To hurry adoption along even more I expect them to be more aggressive with Windows 7's EOL schedule than they were with XP, which was generous to start and then extended.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
There are few advantages, such as minor performance improvements and some of the Metro apps are actually quite nice for a notebook or tablet: IE10, Windows Mail, the 3rd party Wikipedia and Khan Academy apps. That being said, I felt that the constant flicking through Start screen, Desktop and Metro apps was ultimately rather painful. They really are like two worlds that don't integrate at all. Also, the graphics are crappy. You could say it is minimalism, but I see it just as having no style at all. Just look at the startup logo or the volume indicator popup as examples. As a little side issue, I experienced audio buffer underruns which does not happen under Win7 with the same laptop.
For a Joe Sixpack machine, I suppose Win8 is just fine. For a power user desktop, it's a turd.
8?
Truly, 2013 will be the year of the Linux desktop!
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
It works quite well in 512MB in a VM. Try it on a hypervisor that can do dynamic memory some time (Hyper-V and ESX can). Set it to 512MB minimum and a plenty high max. Fire it up, watch it drop to 512MB used.
Also if you are planning on using XP in VMs you'd better either plan on taking them off the net or plan on moving to something else since support for it ends in 2014 and running a networked OS that doesn't get patches is a bad idea.
Vista never got close, and it was because corporate users ignored it en-masse. Microsoft still counted sales because new PCs came with it, but they were immediately reimaged back to XP so never showed up in the usage stats. 7 is now passing XP because companies are now shifting to 7 (gradually). Few of them have any interest in switching to 8 due to the expense, retraining, and general lack of things making it worth doing for a large company.
On top of that, with Microsoft's new plan to go to more frequent, smaller OS updates, "8" will only be on sale for a comparatively short period of time before the next update. Are they going to call that update Windows 8? Probably not. 8's reputation isn't exactly stellar in many circles, and they can polish up the rough edges and use the update for a rebrand.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Where do those stats came from and how old are they?
Latest stats from two well-known sources show quite different numbers:
NetApplications - North America + Europe:
Win7 43%
WinXP 21%
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10&qpaf=-000%09100%090%0DO000%09100%091%0D
Statcounter - WORLDWIDE
Win7 53%
WinXP 26%
Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201111-201211
After Microsoft stopped to sell it four years ago? With that-what-must-not-be-named, which was intended to widely replace it, having become available nearly five years ago from now? And with even Windows 7 now being around for more than three years?
I'd say, that's the important message behind the headline, and it's a good one, because it's continued proof that even Microsoft users, even when "the company is doing everything it can to get its users off Windows XP", as TFA says, don't eat every shit they're getting served. And, with Windows 8, there's good hope that Microsoft will be the ones who are going to choke on a new version of Windows, again.
As opposed to running the latest OS with all the holes waiting to be discovered? All that new code, yet to be field tested, all those new holes to be tested out in the wild LIVE, with YOUR production system?
Patches are failure you know. They have unwanted side effects that break production systems. The best thing you can get is a system so thoroughly attacked that it no longer has new vulnerabilities against it that are viable. Then don't upgrade.
No, as a power user I run more than one thing at a time. Let me give you a simple example. For several years I have used Windows 7 and done this simple thing: Watch a webcast from a site like twit.tv and play a game of freecell while watching it. This worked great on Windows 7. On Windows 8, Freecell is not built int - but you can get it free from MS in their Windows Store. It is a huge (196 MB) download, but it installs fine. Every time you launch it, it asks you to sign in to xbox live (I guess MS forgot that solitaire means "alone"). There is no setting to make it stop asking. Then, it is FULL SCREEN. On my 27 inch monitor. There is no way to make it anything but either 100% or 80% (with that Metro Snap thing where you can put a tiny strip of a second metro app up next to it). No webcast I have seen fits in the 20% space without being too tiny to watch. So that simple workflow: watch a webcast while playing freecell no longer works unless you hook up a second monitor. I've been using Windows 8 as my primary OS for 9 months now and I still hate it. Whoever thought that apps should always be full screen on large monitors is an idiot.
It was an example. What happens when you want to run a program and it is only available in metro? Drag and drop to Word? Nope.
Here's another example. I often have documentation opened up in a PDF reader while I program. I alt-tab back and forth. Windows comes with a PDF reader, but it runs in Metro-land. Metro land automatically closes applications when it decides you are done with them, including my documentation. Oh, well, back to a Desktop-land PDF app.
It's just a pain in the ass for no good reason.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
they found the windowsXP "gold key" that gave them till 2-3 years ago to use the update service without installing virus infrested 40 day crack resetting tools. Well Microsoft closed that golden oportunity for a reason, to make it easier to kill windowsXP.
XP is still a breeze to install illegitimate versions:
-Many volume keys were blacklisted, but that is easy to fix. Considering for the past 10 years almost every workplace, school, university, and public library has been running a VL version of XP, it's easy to obtain genuine VL keys.
-A tool, AntiWPA, makes it easy to install an OEM version, use an OEM-SLP key (which will never be blacklisted), and then disable activation check. Reports as genuine.