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Windows XP Falls Below 25% Market Share, Windows 8 Drops Slightly
An anonymous reader writes: Despite support for Windows XP finally ending three months ago, the ancient OS has only now fallen below the 25 percent market share mark. To add to the bad news for Microsoft, after only nine full months of availability, its latest operating system version, Windows 8.1, has lost share for the first time.
For desktop browser share, Chrome is up, taking mostly from Internet Explorer and Firefox. For mobile browsers, Safari continues to fall while Chrome maintains strong growth.
I read the very short article, so you don't have to.
Windows is the bulk, at 91.68%, of that Windows 7 is 51.22%
Mac is 6.64%
And overall, Linux is 1.68%
Microsoft just needs to make an OS that delivers what end-users actually want, with a solid XP emulator so people can continue to run their mission-critical stuff that still requires it.
8 and 8.1 were arrogant attempts at pushing on to end-users a GUI that Microsoft thought they should want, for reasons that did not benefit the end-users at all but did benefit Microsoft quite a lot (in theory, that is).
Microsoft can win by viewing end-users as its clients (heresy, I know), getting back in touch with what they want, and delivering. Until then, expect continued weirdness.
If you piss around with Windows 8 for a while, you can basically simulate Windows 7. But for a long time, you'll still bump into horrible garbage - like "you wanted a weird, functionless fullscreen app to view an image file, right"? Very few things are real showstoppers, but lots of stuff is just a little worse - like they abandoned all the little refinements they've made to progressive versions over the years. Little stuff, like the behavior of the "run" dialog. It used to autocomplete well, and seemed to usually know what you wanted. Now it doesn't.
My job has me doing development on a Windows 8 machine - and it's gotten down to very few times a day I say "oh God, really?", but it's taken a lot of tweaking and adapting to get there. And there's literally nothing I actually prefer about 8. Lots of it just evidences horrible testing/design. Like your default start screen has a tile for the "math input editor" or something. That's a very narrow niche app for a desktop, non-touchscreen computer, and it doesn't work the way anyone expects. Many times I've been asked "what the heck does this do?" - and it actually took me a while to figure out. Obviously that doesn't hurt anyone much to have a stupid, useless app - but the same lack of design pervades the whole product.
It's just a half-baked mess, and I think it's earned it's poor reputation very well.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Maybe it's also because I hate the new skeuomorphic design aesthetic. What's wrong with gloss, gradients, transparency, and attractive animations, or even a bevel or link here and there so we can actually tell something is clickable rather than playing mystery-meat navigation? I swear, everything is going flat-shaded, blocky, ugly, and indistinguishable, all because that's now the new "hip" look.
Skeumorphism - the use of design elements that mimic real life objects with similar functions, is actually the opposite phenomenon from the flat, light-on-pastel design trend. Though I fully agree with you - both of these UI philosophies have been severely overused.
A bit of googling will turn up plenty of articles analyzing the history of the skeuomorphism-versus-flat debate particularly at Apple, which I would argue has been one of the biggest influences in UI design over the last few years. Basically, the loss of skeuomorphism advocates such as Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall led to the pendulum swinging completely in the other direction, and many gimmicky and dated interface elements such as notes apps that look like real paper and a game center that looks like a cheap felt billiard table have been stripped away. But - what to replace it with? Well, everybody wants to stay on top of the latest design trend, and Microsoft and others seem to be migrating to flat designs, so flat it is.
Although you could argue over who copied who, essentially what you have is Microsoft and Apple in a race to see who can flatten their interfaces and strip out any traces of skeuomorphism the fastest. Sure, it looks trendy, but it's reached the point where we are sacrificing usability and accessibility in order to have the most "modern" design. Here's where I have a problem with the whole thing: computer interface elements have been pretty consistent over the last 20+ years or so. Everything behaved as expected and usually acted pretty consistent between operating systems. This is great for users, since they can focus on the task rather than the tools needed to accomplish them, and using the interface becomes second nature. To those who *design* computers rather than *use* them, this is a problem - you want the bling to be noticed. The old way of doing this was to show off your new hardware by making the UI flashy, bright, colorful, inviting - basically by ramping up the skeuomorphic elements to 11.
The problem is, the novelty of this wears off fast, and these interfaces quickly become dated. Now, flat is in, and anything that even remotely resembles skeuomorphism is stripped out. I have a number of problems with the current trend:
1) interface elements are hidden or played down, making them hard to find. Often it's hard to tell if I'm just not looking hard enough for that feature, or if it has been removed altogether.
2) It does away with conventions that have been standard for decades. This means that every time designers go wild designing a new interface, users have to spend time and effort learning a new way to accomplish a task.
3) It's less accessible. Razor thin text is hard for some people to see. Pastel on white and white on pastel text may look "hip" but can incredibly difficult to read. Interface elements that are marginalized can be hard to hunt down if the user doesn't know where to look.
4) It's inconsistent. Some programs hide buttons and scroll bars, some do not. Some use vastly different elements for simple actions such as "close window" so that the user is left guessing at the function of a UI element.
My prediction is that in a few years, "flat" will look as equally dated as skeuomorphism does now.