Windows 7 Trumps Vista By Reaching 20% Share 404
CWmike writes "Windows 7 cracked the 20% share mark last month, a milestone the problem-plagued Vista never reached, Web measurement vendor Net Application said over the weekend. Gregg Keizer reports that Windows 7's online usage share reached 20.9% in December, up 1.2 percentage points from the month before. Windows Vista, meanwhile, fell by half a point to 12.1%, its lowest share since July 2008. Vista peaked at 18.8% in October 2009, the same month that Microsoft launched Windows 7. The other standout finding: XP is projected to still account for 13% when it's retired in 2014."
An anonymous reader adds news that Google's Chrome browser is nearing 10% market share.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still having a hard time understanding what technologies exist in 7 that don't in XP AND are something I ( or a business would need ).
The only reason to upgrade from XP is because security updates are due to end soon. And while that's a valid reason, most businesses are going to be asking themselves why they should upgrade if that's the only reason.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still having a hard time understanding what technologies exist in 7 that don't in XP AND are something I ( or a business would need ).
I still feel that way about XP and Windows 2000. Welcome to the upgrade treadmill. You got on it by choice, now upgrade.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
not to mention that XP was TERRIBLE at managing multiple cores/processors and memory
I'm surprised how often this isn't mentioned. To extend, XP also has problems differentiating between an SMT core and an actual real core (important with all these i5s and i7s). Seen XP SP3 think its a good idea to put a double threaded job on "processor 0 and 1" with 2 and 3 empty. Problem is 0 and 1 was the same core, so effectively half the CPU was unused. Windows Vista and 7 don't make the same mistake - and thats part of the reason you on a SMT capable processor often see certain cores facing much higher workloads on average than others.
Vendors are Lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista took the hits that prepared the wider software-ecosystem for 7.
Another thing to think about is that with Windows 7 64-bit is now entering the mainstream. My 7 machine is 64-bit and I have 8GB in the puppy. Of course, my Ubuntu laptop is also 64-bit even though it only has 2GB of RAM.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
The start/all-programs menu for Win7 is vastly superior to XP, as is Windows Explorer. Have you actually sat down and tried to use them as they're meant to be used? Or have you tried to use them as if you were still using XP?
For example, I almost never use the "All programs" menu any more. No need. Everything I want or need is either on the task bar (pinned there) or on the start menu (pinned there or in the 'recently used' section), or available with just a few keystrokes typed in the search box.
I find I'm far more productive with Win7 than I ever was with XP. Going back to XP just gives me this feeling of XP constantly getting in the way... I feel utterly constrained by its limitations and annoyances. Windows 7 is a definit advance, and is definitely worth the upgrade.
I "upgraded" my XP laptop a while back (after using it at work for a while), and even though it's not a true 'upgrade', it was one of the most painless windows installs I've ever experienced (and I've done a LOT of them). Yeah, I had to reinstall my apps, but the data moved over pretty painlessly. I was up and running in under a day, easily.
I'm not sure what you even mean by the XP start menu working more "cleanly" than Win7's... the exact opposite is the case. The Win7 start menu is just vastly superior. Of course, you have to take the time to actually learn this fact.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
XP's Service Packs were the equivalent of Mac OS's upgrades, but they were free. The most notable upgrade was Service Pack 2, which introduced the firewall, pop-up blocker, Bluetooth support, Windows Security Center, etc. Sure, it is not a patch on the monumental changes introduced with Vista, but when people say that XP did everything that they needed they actually should say that XP SP2 did all they need. If you gave someone a computer with the original version of the OS then they wouldn't be so happy.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, I'm not sure what you're even talking about. I haven't experieenced anything like what you're describing (and can't even really follow what you're talking about)... are you talking about just blind-typing really fast into the start menu search bar and pressing enter without even looking?
Essentially, yes, thats what he's talking about.
Lots of machines have that Windows Menu key now days.
Whack that, (or click the start icon)
Cursor is already in the search box.
At that point, if you know the name of the application, a fast typist, or a keyboard oriented user can launch just about anything faster than a mouse user drilling thru the start-bar.
Re:Drivers, drivers, drivers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, what? Drivers aren't the bottleneck from DAWs that I've seen. It's that VST effects and other apps/plugins are 32-bit. Most DAW software has figured out how to bridge 32-bit VST to 64-bit now, though, by running a dummy 32-bit process to communicate with.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's really lame, short-sighted reasoning. Many of the features would be useful to average office workers, and the "confusion" is a very short-term thing. It's transient. It's not big enough to justify never upgrading, given all the other benefits (security, stability, easier to use, easier to support, etc, etc).
Unless you're suggesting a switch to Linux, in which case it's the only reason you'll ever need.
Okay, seriously: I can see the point on both sides of this argument. Change is disruptive, and until the change is accompanied by a perceived reward significant enough to offset the short-term discomfort, it's simply human nature to resist it.
Apple got a lot of people moving in their direction by very successfully leveraging the social benefits. (Snide remarks here and elsewhere about metrosexual hipster-wanna-be Apple users are a not-so-tacit criticism of this effect.) Linux got most of the geeks onside because it rewards technical prowess (or, in some cases, the illusion thereof).
But Windows has been relying on its own inertia^Wmomentum for so long that fear of change is a legitimate argument against upgrading. In short, the Windows XP user base is increasingly self-selected for this trait. My prediction: the first 20% for Windows 7 is the easy one.
XP features for Windows 7 (Score:2, Insightful)
I cannot recommend ClassicShell [sourceforge.net] enough to people who skipped Vista and (relatively) recently moved to Windows 7. It will not take care of all the quirks in Explorer, but a lot. Just the "folder up" button is worth installing this.
No, I am not involved with this project at all.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
Grr, slashcode ate a paragraph.
Anyhow, long rant short - looking at some common tasks. I'm not comparing stock XP against stock Win7, but my tweaked versions of both, because I'm a bit OCD about reducing the number of keystrokes to do things to the minimum possible.
1) Launching very common apps via the taskbar. XP - quick launch toolbar to launch, taskbar to switch. Win7 - One taskbar to both launch and switch. Victor: XP. The user knows better than Windows when he wants to launch something, and when he wants to switch. It *is* possible to get the quick launch toolbar back in Win7, but requires a hack to do so.
2) Launching common apps via the start menu. XP - I have a folder off the start menu containing all my common locations and tasks, reachable with two keypresses (Win, I). A third keystroke takes me to the directory or task I want to get into. I've got 10 items in the base directory, and more from the hierarchical directories inside of it. Win7 - can pin a (small) number of things to the start menu directly before it gets too ugly for words. Keystrokes don't work all the time, since they're sitting on the root start menu, so it's usually a matter of hitting Win, and then scrolling to or (ugh) clicking on our commonly used task or directory. Victor: XP. Looks much cleaner, and doesn't require using the mouse at all to navigate the UI quickly. Switching to mouse = loss.
3) Switching tasks via alt-tabbing. XP - hit alt-tab. Win7 - hit alt-tab or Win-tab. Win7 allows previewing the windows before switching to them, instead of relying only on name. Victor: Win7
4) Switching tasks via toolbar. XP - click on the toolbar. Win7 - click on the toolbar, look at the popup that appears, scroll through the live task previews, and with the mouse (ugh) click on the one you want. Victor: 1 click vs. 2 clicks and a scan? XP. (Note: Win7 can disable this via options, unlike the start menu, which is fixed in it's broken state).
5) Launching uncommon apps. XP - Win, P. By default, this just shows you the last few apps you've run. Expanding it out (down arrow) shows you your hierarchical organization of tasks. Recently installed apps near the end, otherwise they've been sorted (by me) and easy to find. Win7 - type the name of the task. If it's working properly, and you know the name (pop quiz - what's the name of that HDR photo editing suite you bought three years ago?) and you only have one copy of the name, it works well. Unfortunately, those three things break all too easily. I was giving a workshop, and half the laptops couldn't launch sound recorder from their start menu. The other half could. So I had to take very valuable time walking a classroom of teachers into the Windows directory to launch it directly, since their start menus were not indexing correctly. When you have to hit "all programs" on Win7, that's just an epic loss compared with the hierarchical organization of XP. Victor: XP, by a clear margin. Faster, more reliable, more organized.
6) Saving a file to the desktop. XP - hit the giant bloody "Desktop" button right there. Win7 - made the link tiny, and buried it within a nest of worthless crap. On small screens, it tends to collapse the nest down to things that you don't actually need. Watching teachers spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to save to the fucking desktop because Microsoft buried it within mountains of pointless (for them) crap makes me want to put staples through my fucking eyes. Again, they optimized the uncommon case at the expense of the common. Your average user saves to the desktop a lot more than they save to a workgroup file server. If they don't even have a file server, or even a workgroup, why is this shit eating up all of their valuable 9" screen space? Victor: XP
7) Navigate up to the desktop from a folder on the desktop. XP - hit the giant bloody "up arrow", or the backspace key. Done. Now you can operate with the files on your directory easily. Win7 - open a folder on the desktop. Look hopelessly at the breadcrumbs. Pound your head i