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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)."
Windows 8 is still a piece of shit, and most people got it because their device came preinstalled with it... they didn't choose it.
As long as the old junk is better then the new junk. They continue to use it.
Just saying it like it are.
...and 10.49% of all PC users are running disastrously new systems.
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when did this site become the new site for Microsoft uninteresting press releases about their so-called successes ?
Since this isn't a MS press release, I'm guessing "when" is "somewhere in the future".
You have been found out!
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It's at least more or less OK as long as it is updated and patched. Happened to run across an XP machine a couple of weeks ago... which had not yet had SP1 installed yet. The weird thing was that it was actually in a quite good shape. I guess it was just too old for the vulnerabilities are exploited nowadays.
Oh the pain people have for those who won't upgrade. Give me a break. As long as it works, why not let it function? Is it because of the security boogy-man? NSA? What's the rub?
put it another way: WinXP is still roughly three times as popular as Win8, and even Unity is probably more popular than WIn8 but no meaningful is data available.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
There's still applications that won't run on win7 and the new MS Office still runs on XP. Add in some GUI changes that people have to get used to (unless someone like me or you puts it in "classic mode" for them) and those things combined are enough of a barrier for some people not to bother.
So plenty of reasons until that killer app comes along that won't work on XP.
Windows 7 is better than XP, but not by a lot. That is, it is not worth the pain to reinstall Windows on the same PC (like it was upgrading from 98 and especially ME to XP).
Of course, when I built a new PC a couple of months ago I installed Windows 7 on it (8 just looks awful, even with ClassicShell).
I knew I was going to see this here. Disastrous12 year old software. For the record system builders were stilled allowed to install XP on new netbooks up until October 22, 2010, and new machines were still being cleared from inventory Christmas 2011. So it is still pretty new to a few people. Up until three years ago it was still new software. That is not very old for a desktop installation.
But that doesn't play into your "not Microsoft's fault stupid people won't update their software every decade" theme you have to have going on here, does it? 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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Windows XP is currently on my daughters netbook. It may well run Windows 7 or 8. However a quick check on Amazon and it costs £50-100 quid to update it, plus a chunk of my time. And I don't know for sure it will work.
To me that seams a good reason to run Windows XP. It is behind a firewall, runs AV software that is set to auto-update and the login my daughter uses can not install anything.
Why should I upgrade? What does Windows 7 or 8 give me in this case?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/windows-8-x-breaks-10-percent-internet-explorer-11-makes-a-splash/
XP has a number of limitations that Win7 and Win8 supercede -- nearly all XP installs still running are the 32-bit version with a 4GB limit on RAM and a 2TB limit for disk volumes, and as far as I know XP doesn't support TRIM for SSDs. It also limits out at DX9, important for gamers and there are probably other limitations due to its age and end-of-support status.
I'm OK with Win8, I run it exclusively in desktop mode where it presents a look and feel similar to Win7. I pinned my most used programs on the taskbar so I don't need to invoke the start menu very often. I have Vistart installed as a shell replacement but I could work without it if I had to. The upgrade to 8.1 on my main machine went OK apart from the very large download (3 GB plus) needed to make it happen but I was satisfied with the original OS release (I still have it on another desktop which is waiting for a replacement motherboard).
I agree that XP has a number of limitations. Actually, Bioshock Infinite was my main reason to build a new PC with Windows 7 (and two 6core CPUs). Having 32GB RAM is also nice. I use a 15kRPM HDD and not a SSD (as I did in my XP PC), so I do not care about TRIM.
However, for a lot of uses, XP is still good enough. For example, reading/writing MS Word documents, browsing the web works just as well on XP as it does on 7. If it wasn't for the games, I think I would have continues to use my XP PC for a couple of years. Now I had to build a new PC without waiting for the new CPUs to come out and this may bite me in the future (I do not want to reinstall Windows (no matter which version), so now I am stuck with this PC until 7 becomes the new XP or maybe even longer if the newer versions of Windows are crap). Maybe it is possible to just move the system hard drive to a new PC, but I would have to somehow try that without actually building the new PC (if I build it and it turns out I can't move my installation, then what?).
Actually, I continue to use XP on my Viliv N5 and my laptop, because both devices do not have a lot of memory so XP works better there and I am not planning on playing DX10/11 games on those devices.
7 (the 64bit version anyway) also has a very annoying security feature - the requirement that all drivers have to be signed. I had to spend some time to make my TV input card work and may have similar problems in the future. At least I could turn off this "feature" in older (and 32bit) versions of Windows.
ClasicShell (= normal Start menu) makes Windows 8 usable. However, to me the theme just looks bad with the borderless windows. I prefer the XP look (with a custom red color scheme) as that's what I used for the past 10 years or the 9x/2k look (what I am using on my new Windows7 PC). Windows 8 no longer has that, I guess it would make it look more like a PC and less like a tablet.
And then comes the obvious suggestion: "punish them for trying to make you buy their new crap by buying their older crap instead. That will teach them." It is painful to watch you guys work. You know that, don't you?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you look at the Dec 2013 data Vista has 3.61% share and WinDoze 8.1 has 3.60%. What's more amazing is that Vista's share went up between Nov 2013 and Dec 2013. Gotta love it!!!
Karma: Bad
I have a house full of laptops including a Lenovo Yoga with Win8. I sort of get what they were going for - a machine that's more 'live' in response to a very limited suite of core functions that people use tablets for. The problem is that all the underlying apps don't see the world that way - they work the old way. So you have to re learn a new way to access your old apps which still work more or less the same old way - except where they don't. Or where they for no reason left off basic apps like a DVD player. Or the security suite doesn't really start all the time and you have to jump through enormous hoops to get it running.
I guess from a human factors standpoint they were going for making the machine more transparent to the function. The problem is that they only got part-way. It's analogous to using a GPS but having to tell it the name of the street you're on after every turn. Or alternatively, it's like owning a driverless car which works sort of ok until it doesn't and then you discover that you have to replace the ignition key to open the door - once you're already inside if something goes wrong.
If they were going for a user experience that made the computer invisible then they really failed. In some ways they made it worse because just as many things need user attention as before but it's harder to do them.
And meanwhile, desktop Linux made record growth from 1.56% to 1.73%.
XP was mostly very badly received on geek sites like Slashdot
XP's greatest sin at the time was bloating up Windows 2000 without adding any significant features to compensate. Cheap memory and several service packs fixed most of those complaints. Vista had similar birthing problems, but in the end we got Windows 7, which is pretty good.
The thing about Windows 8 is that performance is not a complaint you typically hear. In fact, it seems faster than 7. No amount of hardware improvements will fix Windows 8's deficiencies, so we are left with service packs for hope. For the next few years, it's a non-issue as companies will run Windows 7.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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.
XP has a number of limitations that Win7 and Win8 supercede -- nearly all XP installs still running are the 32-bit version with a 4GB limit on RAM and a 2TB limit for disk volumes, and as far as I know XP doesn't support TRIM for SSDs. It also limits out at DX9, important for gamers and there are probably other limitations due to its age and end-of-support status.
You could turn that around by saying that XP just didn't need more than 4GB of RAM and 2TB hard disk space. And as for DX9, according to Steam's Hardware & Software Survey, XP use is at 6.35% so it appears that gamers have already figured out that they need to upgrade.
Obviously the people using XP now are still satisfied with the OS. It is a vicious circle that you need to upgrade to use more hardware (RAM/HD), when it is only because that you have upgraded your software that you need to access more hardware.
I would like to point out that 15K RPM HDDs are a waste of money for the vast majority of home and SOHO workloads. 7200 RPM drives of significantly higher capacities greatly outperform 10K and 15K HDDs. Higher rotational speed only improves the rotational latency. The greatly increased data density of lower RPM drives easily offsets this. High RPM drives are almost always short-stroked which means your heads never find their way to outer tracks by design. A 7200 RPM drive with the same platter density as the 15K RPM drive will have higher sequential read times on the first (outermost) tracks simply because more data passes under the head in the same amount of time.
If you have very random accesses (and LOTS of them) in your workload, 15K RPM makes total sense. Games loading big files full of world data would only fit this description when those files are severely fragmented. Likewise with A/V editing: big files with long runs of sequential data accesses don't benefit from having the rotation speed slightly more than doubled but the density less than halved. (I did this song and dance when the VelociRaptor drives appeared on the market and even found someone with one they'd let me bench out for my workloads; I found that they can't beat a larger, slower drive for what I was doing.)
Now, if you've got a huge SQL database that has a ton of queries per second going on, you might stand to benefit from the higher worst-case performance. However, in modern times, such a database would probably benefit far more from a hardware RAID system or some SSD storage anyway.
Office 2013 doesn't run on anything older than Windows 7.
Office 2013 is an abomination and I'd rather it ran off a cliff. The font anti-aliasing and hinting have been broken and make my eyes bleed, the interface is worse than in 2010, less function more showing off.
The typing animation, that draws symbols on screen with a second or so delay is even worse (yeah, I understand it's for tablet users, so they don't feel like they're painfully slow when typing, but you could at least disable it on desktops, where it creates the impression of deadly slow computer).
Or you could buy a copy of VueScan and keep using the old scanner.
It's a third-party scanner driver package for basically every scanner ever. For Windows, Macs, and Linux.
The majority of sold laptops do not come with touchscreens, even today. Where did you get that impression? It's still a feature you have to specifically search for.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
WINE runs both IE6 and MS Office. Since you have licenses you're legit, although IE6 can be run under WINE without a Windows license.
Borg:"Lawsuits are irrelevant. GPL3 is irrelevant. DRM is good. We understand security... Alert! MS are assimilating us!
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.
Everyone who has paid attention to Windows the last couple of decades knows, Windows 8 is the one you skip. Just like Vista, just like Millennium Edition before that. Sure they threw a in a minor wrinkle in with 8.1, but that was just a distraction to make you think they are doing something, not a major version roll. 98(SE) decent, ME suck, XP decent, Vista suck, 7 good, 8 suck. Next time around they'll keep the back end improvements and fix all the crap they screwed up in the front end.
From the day W7 came out, many XP users had no upgrade path; at least those who were smart enough to have not upgraded to Vista. You can't (and never could) perform an upgrade from XP to W7. You had to go through Vista first, or do a complete reinstall. I believe that was a deterrent for many.
MSFT must agree Win 8 is shit, which is why its support is ending in just 2 years in January 2016. The preinstall aspect must explain why its market share grew despite the pending doom.
This is being handled differently than Vista SP1, which was really a disguised upgrade of Vista to Server 2008's codebase but it didn't involve an actual heavyweight OS upgrade & software reinstall (which seems to be the case for going from Win 8 to 8.1).
The windoes world is unlike the iWorld. People are neither forced or need to upgrade every time there is a new shiny out there. Windows 8 will not have significant widespread adoption until windows 7 pc's meet their physical demise. The upgrade from XP to 7 (if hardware capable) offered some advantages but not enough that hordes flew to 7. 8 vs 7 is the same phenom - its a bit faster, has a few new tricks but all in all for the average user that only desires the "desktop" its just not on that must have list. It is not that 8 is not good but that 7 is more than good enough.
I don't care so much about 8 and I won't until 7 nears end of life. But I don't want XP machines on the Internet for "general use" (e.g. web browsing, etc.) or directly connected to the Internet at all (no hardware firewall) as they are much more likely to be compromised in a way that can hurt me or the general public than supported operating systems.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Because I and a million others could have (and often did) tell you this would be the case back when I first tried a late Win8 preview build. MS could have had multiple times the current market share had they simply not *forced* Metro on people who didn't want it. You know, like do a quick check upon install to see if the PC is a touchscreen tablet and then default to the desktop with a classic Start Menu if you weren't on an appropriate device.
Instead, they chose to piss off tons of people by forcing their phone interface on people who use office applications. And now two years later, they get the market share they more or less deserve.