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Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Pass 10% Market Share, Windows XP Falls Below 30%
An anonymous reader writes "With the release of Windows 8.1 to the world in October, Microsoft ended 2013 with two full months of availability for its latest operating system version. While Windows 8.1 is certainly growing quickly and eating into Windows 8s share, the duo has only now been able to pass 10 percent market share, while Windows 7 seems to be plowing forward unaffected. The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 made steady progression in December 2013, gaining a combined 1.19 percentage points (from 9.30 percent to 10.49 percent). More specifically, Windows 8 gained 0.23 percentage points (from 6.66 percent to 6.89 percent), while Windows 8.1 jumped 0.96 percentage points (from 2.64 percent to 3.60 percent)."
My mother got a new laptop just before Christmas that came preloaded with Windows 8. Over Christmas, she installed the 8.1 upgrade. The amount of swearing did appear to decrease very slightly, but it still did things like pop up the People app for no obvious reason (e.g. when she was in the middle of filling in a password in a field in a web page) with no obvious way of closing it, or send her to the home screen without making it obvious how she got back to the doing-stuff screen. The only way I found to get from one of the randomly popping up Metro apps back to whatever she was doing was hit alt-F4. Hardly the most discoverable UI I've seen...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's why they fixed most of the issues in Windows 8.1. You should try it.
Would love to try it, but after Dell updates and Windows Update had a fist fight on the new christmas present laptop for mum-in-law it meant that neither update system could complete all the updates thus leaving the OS in a position that it would not offer 8.1 in the store. Coupled with no obvious way to back out of the problem (no install DVD, and install-creator fucked up 3 times) - I gave up and she got Linux. It's not all Microsoft's fault - Dell's tools simply didn't work, however, there shouldn't be competing methods that you can't obviously switch off for doing things like this.
The funny thing is she doesn't even know she has Linux. She used to use Thunderbird, Firefox and libreoffice on Windows XP and so it just looks the same for her.
The UI is a mess. It's completely alien to anyone coming from XP/W7, and the features that supposedly make it touchscreen-friendly are completely counter-productive to anyone who doesn't intend to use a touchscreen (for example people with a 27-inch screen that sits two arm-lengths away). Hotspots in particular - just moving the mouse cursor somewhere causing an action is an absolute no-no and very counter-intuitive. How is anyone supposed to know that moving the mouse cursor to the top right corner does something special and right-clicking in the lower-right corner has a completely different meaning than right-clicking anywhere else on the screen? Actions should be initiated by mouse clicks on visible UI elements, not by mouse movements to magic areas on the screen.
And the app store is a mess. I only knew the app store for Symbian and thought it was a mess since Symbian is officially dead and buried (app store full of nonsense crapware, X varitions of the same app with each author hoping you'll miss the best one and install his instead, etc), but the windows app store suffers from the exact same problems.
Oh, and it doesn't come with solitaire. And the solitaire from the app store (for which you nee an "MS account") is an overloaded piece of bloatware. Luckily, XP solitaire still runs on W8. This saved the day.
Tried going the W7 route on a few systems. Driver issues suck. No USB or Ethernet or WIFI out of the box after downgrading to W7. Instead of using another machine to get the drivers I just popped in a Debian LiveCD and used Firefox on the WIFI to D/L the W7 drivers into the windows partition. Turns out inept windows developers can't even compile a USB and Ethernet driver properly. It all works fine on Linux out of the box, no special BS to do to get things working, but now I wait for the moronic devs for the windows drivers who didn't test the W7 drivers on their support site to get around to fixing it.
The thing works in W8. I've made my own drivers for my custom hardware projects. You literally just have to re-compile the damn thing for the right OS. If I had the windows driver source code I could do it myself. The team they outsource to create the Linux drivers was far less retarding than the Windows morons -- which supposedly has a larger market share... Really though? Each MFG has a different windows driver? Why? They all use a common set of chipsets, so one driver meets many separate devices -- typical windows inefficiency. Linux avoids this somewhat since they write drivers for the hardware, not the vendor. So either it's intentional ineptitude to drive W8 adoption, or just bat-shit insanity. I'd say screw dual booting this bastard, and just use Linux, running Windows in a damn VM like I always do (if needed) -- But the machine isn't for me. Had similar problems thrice now on different hardware vendor lines. If I didn't know better I'd think it wasn't a conspiracy.
Now it's a matter of people getting jacked out of what they paid for sooner than a reasonable expectation, on hardware that won't even run the upgrade. Completely screws up your flow. Now it's not their fault. Sorry for ruining your party.
It's certainly their fault. MS publishes the EOL dates for OSes and has been extending XP's EOL from many many years even though they didn't have to. People expecting updates till the end of time is not Microsoft's fault, everyone likes free stuff. The EOL dates are here. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/default.aspx?LN=en-us&x=15&y=15&c2=14019 If you buy Windows 7 or 8 expecting support till 2050, it's certainly your fault if MS fails to meet your expectation.
Not to mention, a huge chunk of XP users are using pirated installs, especially in places like China. Which other company supports OSes for so long? Buy an Apple computer for 4 times the price in 2001 and it would've gone out of support in a few years. How many years does an Android phone get supported with updates? 2?
Not to mention that XP users are holding back web and application development. It's time to move on.
This space for rent.
The head of the Windows division got fired shortly after Win8 shipped, and the whole company seems to be treading water while the board hunts for a new CEO.
It's unrealistic to expect any changes to the Windows 8 vision until that shakes out. But when it does, you can bet the Surface/metro thing will get ripped apart, and Julie Larson-Green will be replaced by someone who isn't just keeping a seat warm. Whether that's for better or worse really depends on who the CEO is.
In my experience, most manufacturer support site drivers are literally nothing more than the original driver from the device's primary chip maker, but sometimes they've shipped with different INF files. Fortunately, aside from having a massive driver collection, I wrote software that automatically generates a drivers folder for me (in Linux) from the computer's own hardware information. It's scary how my driver folder maker is more accurate than Windows: turns out if it selected something for a piece of hardware, even if Windows won't auto-install that driver and thinks it's not correct, you can force it and things always work anyway!
* The Start Menu was a stupid holdover from the Program Manager in Windows 3, which itself sucked
The Start Menu only peripherally resembles the program manager. Every modern OS has a way to start programs. You can start programs from the Apple menu.
The idea that every installed application needs to be installed again in another place is just plain dumb.
The idea that making a program shortcut is doing an install is just plain dumb.
IMHO, Macs had a better solution in the early 90s
From System 7 through System 9 the solution was precisely the same as Windows, indeed, in every way. The programs are installed to one location, and then if you want them to be easier to open, you'd create Aliases. And because of Windows envy, there were launcher apps for the control strip that would emulate a start menu. How can Apple have had a better solution when they had the same solution?
Smart people work at MS, so I assume it had to do with compatibility or performance on the limited machines of the time.
You're committing two failures here. One, assuming their solution was undesirable, which it wasn't as it worked quite well and the start menu has become the most copied interface element after the window and the close gadget. Two, assuming that smart people are calling the technical shots at Microsoft, when there's no evidence whatsoever that this has ever been true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Turns out inept windows developers can't even compile a USB and Ethernet driver properly. It all works fine on Linux out of the box, no special BS to do to get things working, but now I wait for the moronic devs for the windows drivers who didn't test the W7 drivers on their support site to get around to fixing it.
Netgear now hands users off to a spyware third party before they permit driver downloads at all. Never buying another Netgear product. Couldn't download the drivers without enabling all scripts. So I haven't. I think I will buy some more hardware rather than turn on scripts. And I hope Netgear dies of ass cancer in a fire.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah - so much easier than just right-clicking on the taskbar on the app you want to kill and selecting "Close".
Took myself and my boss ten minutes (we deliberately REFUSED to Google it, to simulate our users) to work out how to close a Metro app properly on a touchscreen (slide from top to bottom or whatever it is).
We honestly tried everything, gave up, Googled it, then turned off Metro as much as humanly possible before deploying it.
I am not entirely in agreement with you, as the apps that were launched from the Apple menu from 1984 up until System 7 were actually special apps that were allowed to run on top of the main app, back before the Apple could multitask. This is a holdover from the pre-hard drive days, when applications were not actually installed but lived on their own 3.5" disks. With System 7, Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, you could manually add apps to the Apple menu but that was not a default. Some installers would do it for you, some not.
But yeah, Apple made it easier to create aliases, and was actually pretty good about following the original on HFS no matter where you moved or renamed it. They had a lot of better usability, but from 1990 to 1998 their OS development had stagnated, letting Microsoft catch up and even surpass them until Mac OS X managed to mature enough to make Classic Mac OS obsolete.
The Start menu emulation that you are referring to came from a popular third party system extension (remember those?) but was not part of Classic Mac OS. I cannot speak for NextStep, as I never used that. I was a Mac user when Apple was doomed, not a Next user.
Installing applications in one folder is the philosophy that won out, as we see in Mac OS X since it went on sale. There is even a further division that you have the root Applications folder, but also each user has an Applications folder —that no one really uses, but since it would hurt the few that do use it to remove it Apple has left it as it is.
But your closing point, I agree. Microsoft in (especially in the Ballmer era) was never really driven by the developers, but by the sales force. They did have lots of great developers (and still do), but programmers and engineers do not thrive in a Glengarry Glen Ross environment.
For me there are no showstoppers, though. I'd go as far as saying that I slightly prefer using 8.1 + Classic Shell (with filetype associations re-assigned to non-Metro applications) to a stock Windows 7 installation. Startup is quicker, the file copy dialogue and task manager are improved, and I never liked Aero Glass. There's certainly no compelling reason to 'downgrade' to Windows 7, any more than there is to 'upgrade' a Windows 7 system to 8. Of course, if I were stuck with a locked down Windows 8 installation with its horrible default configuration and jarring interface shifts, that would be an entirely different story. Windows 8.x is still an awful experience out of the box, but there's nothing serious that a knowledgeable user with an admin account can't fix in 10 minutes (or at least, nothing that has affected me so far).
Pretty much this. The worst part of Windows 8, out of the box, is the interface shifts for tasks such as looking at image files. But fixing those is pretty easy. When the lousy "Photos" app opens, close it, right click the file, "Open with...", and change the associated app for all files of that type. Do it once and never think about it again. I can't remember the last time I was shunted into Metro.
If you don't like the start screen, install Classic Shell or Start8. (I actually prefer the start screen, but due to a multi-monitor issue--well, Eyefinity issue--I'm now running Start8.)
What I like is the number of suggestions to "just install Linux", as if Linux needs less configuration than the above. I think people who make that suggestion are ignorant, biased, or would always recommend Linux simply because it's their preference. The last one is fine in certain circumstances, but those people should be honest about it.
If you can't convince them, convict them.