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Windows 8 and 8.1 Pass 15% Market Share, Windows XP Drops Below 20% Mark
An anonymous reader writes Everyone is well-aware by now that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have not seen the impressive adoption rate of their predecessor. Yet the duo had a particularly good run last month, finally passing 15 percent market share together. Together, they owned 16.80 percent of the market at the end of October, up from 12.26 percent at the end of September. Windows XP meanwhile dropped a whopping 6.69 points to 17.18 percent. The biggest catalyst for these changes was most likely back to school sales in September, which are better reflected in the data after students use their new machines for a full month.
It's not supposed to be funny. Windows 8 is broken, and consumers have been very vocal about that.
and I swore a lot less at Win98 than I did at 8.0. Win8.1 is useable, but still bites at your fingers now and again.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's interesting that while 8.1 is around 10%-ish, 8 is still about 5%.
Perhaps 8.1 is the one that comes with downgrade to Windows7 option. I wonder if they counted how many licenses are downgraded after purchase.
This is measuring actual usage, not what people bought.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels. It regularly disables my wireless card so that it can reset it and verify my connection by reestablishing the link with Microsoft's privacy-invading servers. Windows 8.1 has a kind of crash I've never seen in any Windows version until this one: memory management. As in, with Windows 8.1 Microsoft has actually failed to correctly produce a functioning, reliable core operating system component.
I rarely talk bad about Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 because it's nigh on impossible to lament its failures without people popping out of the woodwork to detract from conversation. I bet this post will be marked "troll", but I'm not pretending, I'm not trying to elicit a negative emotional response, I don't want to start an argument, and I'm not just bashing Microsoft. MS has done many great things as well, since Windows 8 was released. Accessibility to assistance in learning Windows programming is better than ever before, as one example, and their support and development communities have grown in quality by leaps and bounds.
Now let's mention the one and only discussion we've seen about Windows 10 having a keylogger embedded in it while overlooking that random forum posters have said that it's because the OS is in beta but Microsoft has never confirmed that the keylogger would be removed.
Windows 7 is still the best operating system for consumers. Linux suffers from inaccessibility to software, though steps are being taken to correct that now. Apple OS represents a culture and not a technical solution. Windows still reigns as king, but Windows 8 and onward thus far remain to potentially dethrone it.
Windows 8 is pretty good once you install something like Start8. They really have improved a lot of things. Aside from the Metro UI, use of which can be reduced over 95%, by using Start8 and setting your file associations right, what is so bad about Windows 8? It is a little bit less shiny, more boxy, but it runs fantastic.
Have you actually given it an honest try? Use it every day for two months, with a start menu replacement, and you will have enough time to realize all the good stuff.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels.
Gosh...if you search for something, and it looks on the web, it gets sent to the web search engine. Those bastards.
Oh wait... well, suppose you don't WANT it to search the web, just the local computer? And Microsoft forces every search to go the web? Those bastards!
Oh wait... you can turn that 'feature' off? Let me guess -- its a registry hack or some obscure command line thing right? Its actually simpler to block them at the DNS, router, and hosts level... Those bastards.
Oh wait... its a simple gui accessible option in search. The section is called "Use Bing to search online" and the option is called "Get search suggestions and web results from Bing", and its a simple on or off.
Well... other operating systems don't pull this shit... uhoh... OSX Spotlight has this option too? And Ubuntu does too?
Overreact much? Did you even think to look whether you could simply turn it off before you ran to your firewall configuration in your router?
I'm curious - do you use a touch-screen system? Because obviously the OS is designed primarily for that form factor. I'd imagine it would be a pretty good experience there. If not, congratulations... you're a very tolerant person who can adapt well to less-than-optimal UI experiences.
A few of the annoyances, since you asked: Unnecessarily hidden-by-default UI is very sensible on small or touch form factors, but unfortunately, utterly retarded on giant screens with plenty of real estate and using a mouse and keyboard, which represents about 99% of the market (I'd guess). How about the idiocy of putting popup menus in the corners of the screen - right in the place where your mouse happens to land to close a window? Full screen metro apps that can't be resized? On a 27" high-resolution monitor... seriously? The start button was just a convenient focus for consumer annoyance, but yeah, normal people actually still use that button, even if the cool kids don't. How brilliant was it for them to completely remove a convenient, functional, and well-known design element that people have literally been using for a good portion of their entire lives? No, Windows 8 was a mountain of fail from a design and usability standpoint. There's absolutely no getting around this.
Yes, you can get used to just about anything if you use it long enough, of course. It's not like Windows 8 is unusable, but frankly, it's just more annoying to use (and uglier) than Windows 7, and as such, why the heck would I "upgrade"? There are obviously a lot of folks who feel the same way too. There are some nice new features, but none of them are really compelling enough to get past the annoyances.
Windows 10 looks to fix just about all the major complaints people currently have with 8 (except for the ugly visual theme). Really, they should have fixed all this stuff with Windows 8 - they had to have gotten a crapload of early feedback that users were not happy with it, but they arrogantly decided that they knew better, I guess. Microsoft is looking a lot more humble these days, and that's a good thing for users.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
HP is offering an 11" windows 8 notebook w/ 2 meg RAM and 32 Gig SSD for $199. Oh, and it comes with 12 months of Office 365 AND 12 months of 1 TB OneDrive cloud storage... And it can run any any Windows application... The appeal of the Chromebook is what, exactly?
For $50 more, HP will sell you a similar laptop with a 13" touch screen and a slightly larger form-factor.
Ken
The appeal of the Chromebook is what, exactly?
It doesn't run Window 8.