Windows 7 Share Grows At XP's Expense 412
CWmike writes "Microsoft's Windows ran to stay in place last month as Window 7's market share gains made up for the largest-ever declines in Windows XP and Vista, data released today by Web metrics firm Net Applications showed. By these numbers, Windows 7's gains were primarily at the expense of Windows XP. For each copy of Vista replaced by Windows 7 during November, more than six copies of XP were swapped out. Meanwhile, Apple's Mac OS X lost share during November... betcha Ballmer is having an extra giddy time with that news. Linux came up a winner last month, returning to the 1% share mark for the first time since July. Linux's all-time high in Net Applications' rankings was May 2009, when it nearly reached 1.2%."
Re:Linux 20% market share (Score:5, Informative)
How?
The NetApp data:
Windows: 92.52%
Mac OS X: 5.12%
Linux (all flavors): 1.00%
Other (including iPhone, Symbian, Java ME): 1.36%
That's 7.48% "non-MS share" on these numbers (and really only non-Windows--it's not apparent whether they count Windows Mobile as "Windows" or as "Other"). Linux, therefore has 13.37% of the "non-MS market". For comparison of the other ones broken out entirely, Apple has 73.26% of that market (Mac+iPhone). Java ME has 6.1%. Symbian has 2.5%
Re:Linux 20% market share (Score:5, Informative)
There are no error bars. This is a straight dump from their collected information on web traffic.
Anyone who mistakes this information for a statistical evaluation of actual market share by physical units or even actual market share by "web presence" is misusing the data.
They may well try to make a fairly representative sampling based on diversifying websites they collect data from, but day-to-day, let alone month-to-month, variation makes this data at best a rough approximation of the actual market. But they're not claiming that this data is a reflective snapshot of any actual market--they leave that to lazy journalists. Instead, what their statistics track are trends over time using a consistent methodology. It's a clue about the state of the actual market, but nothing more. Only lazy journalists would take a single month's reported numbers and make a claim about actual market share.
Their numbers are accurate to several decimal places--they have an exact count of the "survey respondents"--the over 100 million reporting machines each month. Where there is insufficient data is making a projection from that sample to the actual market (but again, the data can't realistically be used for that). Linux's NetApp share has bounced up and down a distance of 0.1% since the middle of the year. This probably has nothing to do with Linux's actual market share changing and more to do with variations in browsing habits and which sites are recorded.
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux 20% market share (Score:3, Informative)
There are no error bars. This is a straight dump from their collected information on web traffic.
You sure about that? This article indicates they have some form of weighting:
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/02/net-applications-apple-just-lost-half-its-market-share/ [cnn.com]
Re:Good news for Linux (Score:5, Informative)
As an MSDN user, I've actually been using the RTM since before the October, 22 launch. I've run into several kernel-level driver issues (BSOD when enabling jumbo frames on an Atheros PCI-E NIC fixed by reverting to the MS driver, Realtek audio driver refuses to release apps, preventing the system from shutting down, restarting, or going into standby - fixed by reverting to the MS driver or upgrading to the latest driver, and high kernel memory usage with an older Nvidia driver). Each bug was fixed by either using the recommended MS driver, installed by default during the install process, or by upgrading to the latest driver.
There are a number of features I like:
- Feels as fast as XP with better UI
- Meaningful 64 bit support (drivers for everything) compared to XP-64 and to a lesser extent, Vista 64 bit when it was released
- Optimized for Core i7 systems (Core parking improved, doesn't bounce processes from core to core like Vista, uses less power)
- Libraries are great (I have TV shows and Movies spread over many external TB drives which all show up in one library)
- System indexing with the ability to search the remote index on a shared computer instantly - first time a search over a SMB network has been usable
- File sharing performance greatly improved vs. XP
My favorite features at the moment are the improvements to networking. The Homegroup feature does make setting up a network easier. However, I like it due to the addition of remotely-accessible Libraries and instant searching of remote machines.
But the most significant networking improvement vis-a-v XP SP3 is the network throughput over SMB. SMB1 quite simply stinks. I would usually get 7-8 MB/sec transfer speeds in a 100 Mbit connection whereas I always got 11.5 MB/sec - fully saturing the line - with SMB2 in Win 7 - Win 7 transfers and Linux-Linux SFTP/SCP. You really need Vista/7 or Linux to take full advantage of Gigabit networking (OS X performance stinks based on some benchmarks I've seen). SMB2 can saturate a gigabit line at 115 MB/sec whereas at best you'll get around 40-50% usage in XP.
The limitation for me has been my hard drive speed. I've been able to transfer 10 GB movies at 95 MB/sec avg speeds from my laptop to Core i7 desktop using eSATA attached storage on the laptop. I got the identical speed transferring from the same hard drive attached via eSATA on the desktop to the internal SATA drive. RAM --> RAM transfers in jperf sustain 118 MB/sec (99.9% utilization), and I can do about 115 MB/sec if I have a large file in RAM and copy it over the network.
Overally, I'm quite pleased with Windows 7 and glad I upgraded.
Re:Yet another story stating the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
"Vista runs on anything 7 runs on"
Not so. I have installed 7 on the very same hardware that Vista barfed on. I've never seen the BOSD on 7 that Vista threw up frequently. More, 7 runs beautifully in a VM, while Vista is something of a dog. As I said, 7 runs decently on a 1 ghz machine with one gig of RAM. Vista will not.
Re:Yet another story stating the obvious (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
Who said anything about the updates being automatic and direct from Microsoft?
You disable workstations & servers on your network from pinging Microsoft Update directly, instead checking a local WSUS server or getting a push via Active Directory. When patches are released by MS, you check them out in a test lab, and if everything passes, you deploy them to your network via AD or WSUS.
When you have it all set up properly, it really is pretty impressive how well you can manage systems w/ AD and other tools MS provides with very little administrative overhead.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
Active directory is not only used to authenticate users, where it's value is derived from is the ability to organized your entire computer network into organizational units and apply custom policies to each of those OUs. Think of this as having a *nix repository for every OU and in this repo there is a custom script to modify /etc to apply the correct policy to all your machines. Now add the ability to do all this with a couple mouse clicks. This is active directory.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
Average people don't even realize that AD exists on their corporate PCs, nor that it's how corporate IT manages thousands of systems with only a handful of admins.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Informative)
It also allows you to control most aspects of a PC's (or user's) configuration via GPO - security especially.
That Firefox is not easily (if at all) manageable via AD is one of the things holding it back from being accepted in more corporate environments.
What you describe is more akin to SMS and WSUS. AD can assume most or all of that functionality, and then some.
Hear hear! (Score:3, Informative)
I got karma to burn.
Been a switch-hitter between Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows for years. For the past year or so, it's been Ubuntu and Vista. I'd say I spent equal time in both. I've got Ubuntu tweaked to my liking, and when I was mobile, usually used Linux because of the fast boot and wake-from-RAM times. Vista had to be there, well, because Linux multimedia just blows. It took me the good part of a week to get my laptop dock's S/PDIF port to work, and that was only after manually ripping out ALSA and building OSS4 from scratch, and even then, it only ever saw the S/PDIF port as 44.1kHz, 16-bit capable. That said, I enjoy using it, I'm not afraid of the command line, but we've still got a long way to go. I'm not quite yet comfortable with recommending Linux to firends and family. Kudos to getting back up to 1% though!
Windows 7 got clean-installed about a week ago. To me, the UI seems much smoother (No more bajillion clicks to get to a NIC's IP settings page), even the Start menu was given a once-over. To me, it's just as good as Windows 2000, and a marked improvement over XP. But who knows, It's only got a week of clutter on it yet.
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps these links will be of help to you then. You seem to not be up-to-date.
Red Hat and Novell have quite a bit to help manage your Linux (and Windows, in Novell's case) infrastructure; this is only a quick sampling. If you're truly interested in it, you'll need to contact their representatives and have a dog-n-pony show, like the Microsoft ones you've attended.
Re:Well.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yet another story stating the obvious (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
The true power of the Dark Side is that we have cookies.
Re:Yet another story stating the obvious (Score:2, Informative)
So, you are saying that 7 runs better on the same machine with 2GB Ram than Vista with 1GB...
Where can I sign up your blog on 'Good Research Practice' ?
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
I call that CFengine [cfengine.org]. Except I don't have to a mouse, so that's even better.
Re:Good news for Linux (Score:1, Informative)
Except his wife isn't transferring ownership, its common marital property.
Re:It is Vista 1.1 (Score:2, Informative)
1) People tried to run it on old, slow systems and it didn't work well. Of course rather than saying "Man, my hardware is too old for a brand new OS, I should upgrade," they blamed the OS for being bad. This was much less of a problem with 7 since there had been 2 years of hardware advances. While dual cores were still a bit of a high end item when Vista hit the market, they are the majority now.
This was Microsoft's fault in the way they marketed and allowed OEM manufacturers to distribute Vista. I bought a bottom-end Compaq laptop Celeron 540 @ 1.86GHZ with 512MB RAM and Vista was pre-installed. It ran like a dog. All the RAM was taken up when the OS booted and trying to do anything just mean that the swap file thrashed constantly. I upgraded to 1GB RAM, it was bearable. But still limited enough that I tried Ubuntu (starting at 8.10) instead. Now I only go back to Windows for the occasional Windows-only game, and Ubuntu (now 9.10) rarely goes above 600MB of RAM used.
Long story short - Microsoft encouraged Vista installation on hardware that was unsuitable for it. And at least in my case, this caused a user to abandon Windows for Linux.
Re:It is Vista 1.1 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yet another story stating the obvious (Score:4, Informative)
I won't get into a discussion about which is the better virtualization software - but I'm using Sun's Virtual Box - version 3.0.12 and I update with each new release. I allocate 1 gig of memory, and I enable all virtualization options. CPU is an AMD 3400+ (the stupid Victoria chip - I don't have all the virtualization that other chips have)
I turn Aero off, because the video card isn't up to it - or at least not from the VM. (I don't like Aero anyway, I prefer the "Classic" desktop) I also do a little bit of tweaking, but nothing radical. I run Win 7 with Microsoft's security essentials and Threatfire - don't install a heavy duty anti-virus. I tested the earliest beta releases, and I was pleased. The release candidate was a disappointment, because it ran slower than the betas for some reason. But, the final release is right back where the Betas were. It runs just as good as Windows XP with the same memory and options on the same machine.
If it makes any difference at all, I'm running Ubuntu Intrepid on this machine. A Mac may get different results, I have no idea. I just looked - if you're running and INTEL MAC, you're in luck. I don't see a download for PPC MAC. And, I see that they now have version 3.1 available. Time for me to upgrade.
I hope that helps!! ;^)