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Windows Microsoft Technology

Windows 7 Share Grows At XP's Expense 412

Posted by kdawson from the you-used-the-s-word dept.
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%."
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Windows 7 Share Grows At XP's Expense More

Windows 7 Share Grows At XP's Expense

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  • Finally... (Score:2, Funny)

    by ehaggis ( 879721 )
    Year of the Linux Desktop! Seriously, Windows 7 seems to have answered many of the complaints of Vista. "I'm a PC and designed Windows 7 (by complaining loudly)."

    • Yet another story stating the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Runaway1956 ( 1322357 ) * on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:03PM (#30291236) Homepage Journal

      Of course people are upgrading from XP to 7 - if they are upgrading at all. Who upgrades from Debian to Windows? Or, Solaris to Windows?
      Oh - 6 XP users upgrade for every Vista user? Surprise, surprise!! Probably half a billion people in this world THOUGH about upgrading to Vista, but decided not to when Vista proved to be such a bomb.
      Let's remember, Vista wouldn't run on old equipment, while Win7 runs on anything over a gigahertz with a gig of memory. A lot of XP users COULDN'T upgrade to Vista!!

      • Re:Yet another story stating the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)

        by budgenator ( 254554 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @09:28PM (#30292666) Journal

        Of course they are upgrading, my Vista system just decided it wasn't genuine, last month my boss's XP machine decided it wasn't genuine coincidence? If you can't find that little certificate what choice do you have, you can't even buy XP anymore! At least I was dual-booting with Linux but Mozilla reports it's IE6 on Vista.

    • That's not so wrong. If you look at these numbers [hitslink.com], you can see that Mac lost .15%, Windows stayed the same, and Linux gained .04%. So, about 25% of Mac's loss was Linux's gain. The rest seems to have been made up by mobile phones (but not the iphone, which also lost .01%).

      The version trending [hitslink.com] shows that as many people who dumped XP or Vista picked up 7 and as many people as dumped OSX 10.5 picked up 10.6. So, the decline in Mac share comes from pre-10.5. There are a lot of possibilities that jump to mind

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by anss123 ( 985305 )

        That's not so wrong. If you look at these numbers, you can see that Mac lost .15%, Windows stayed the same, and Linux gained .04%. So, about 25% of Mac's loss was Linux's gain. The rest seems to have been made up by mobile phones (but not the iphone, which also lost .01%).

        I suspect these numbers are only meaningful on a year by year basis. 0.15% just does not seem significant enough to make any kind of judgment on. It certainly possible that some users migrated away from 10.5, but it's no less likely that Mac users spent a little less time on the net in November.

        Good to see Windows 7 selling and XP dropping though. XP has become the IE6 of operation systems (as far as application devs are concerned).

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by f0dder ( 570496 )
      I hear Ubuntu 9.10 is cannibalizing users from 9.04 ZOMG the horror.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Endo13 ( 1000782 )

        The reason this is significant is twofold: first, because Windows XP is easily the biggest competitor to Vista and now Windows 7, and second, because an upgrade from Windows XP to 7 [usually] means $$$ for Microsoft, while an upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 means nothing except perhaps a little bandwidth consumption.

  • Good news for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Meshach ( 578918 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:10PM (#30290532)
    I wonder how many of those are people who bought Windows 7 and how many are just people who bought a computer that came with Windows 7?

    • Re:Good news for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:22PM (#30290692)

      I suspect the days of people running out and buying Windows upgrades in droves are behind us. The excitement and wonder doesn't happen anymore because the OS we already have by and large does what we need an OS to do. What defines an OS is now mature, no longer making leaps and bounds of dramatic feature inclusions that matter to Joe Average. Even IT guys are unimpressed.

      Second point: I had my first hands-on with Windows 7 today. I'm somewhat bewildered. In what way is this not Vista 1.1? Sure, okay, there are some cosmetic changes to the taskbar but really, I fail to find anything revolutionary. Certainly nothing that justifies the same folks who've said all along that Vista was "bad" to say that 7 is "awesome". Is a slight reduction in UAC prompts really enough?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Meshach ( 578918 )

        snip

        Second point: I had my first hands-on with Windows 7 today. I'm somewhat bewildered. In what way is this not Vista 1.1? Sure, okay, there are some cosmetic changes to the taskbar but really, I fail to find anything revolutionary. Certainly nothing that justifies the same folks who've said all along that Vista was "bad" to say that 7 is "awesome". Is a slight reduction in UAC prompts really enough?

        I think that MS did that intentionally. Vista was such a pain because it was such a sharp break from XP. Porting any reasonably complex application from XP to Vista is a difficult task; especially if that application has existed since the 9x days. I think MS is trying to do smaller more incremental releases now.

        • Actually, the phrase for it is "mojave #2: retarded bugaloo"

          It's the same concept and reason.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by stokessd ( 89903 )

        I bought a copy of windows 7 for $30 due to my wife's employer being a college. I haven't installed it on anything yet, and I don't have plans to, but for $30 it will be nice to have a legitimate copy if the need arises. For my old Dell laptop and my Parallels needs XP works just fine.

        Sheldon

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Bad news for you is that you don't have a legitimate copy. You have a copy made by Microsoft, but it's still illegal to use a version you are not allowed to use.

          • Bad news for you is that you don't have a legitimate copy. You have a copy made by Microsoft, but it's still illegal to use a version you are not allowed to use.

            Are you implying that if he did not buy the windows copy he was using, it was then NOT made by Microsoft? Is that like the tree falling in the woods sort of thing?

            -Em

      • There were more than a few changes under the covers, the new taskbar is awesome, and the UI changes are more "finished" than the half-complete attempt at UI revision over Vista. Overall, it's probably fair to say that this is what Vista should have been. Libraries are a nice feature, as is the enhanced UI rendering in Win7 (thanks to a lot of overhaul to DX11, and GDI).

      • Unlike Vista it doesn't sit there and grind the hard drive for no discernable reason for ages. That in itself is good enough for me! (and a sad indictment of vista)

        Yes yes turned off prefetch, indexing etc.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by larry bagina ( 561269 )
        Hardware has caught up and peripherals have better drivers. MS really fucked up the expectations by dumbing down the vista requirements.
    • Very few people buy retail copies of Windows. The vast majority of the install base will be from PC manufacturers.

    • Not to mention copies of Windows 7 being given away to TechNet people left and right these days, college students, Windows 7 launch party copies, and the $10 copies that Best Buy employees got.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Real1tyCzech ( 997498 )

        "Windows 7 being given away to TechNet people"

        Uh...I pay a yearly subscription for my TechNet copies. I wouldn't exactly call ~$250 a year "giving away".

    • Re:Good news for Linux (Score:5, Funny)

      by BlackSnake112 ( 912158 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:47PM (#30291038)

      I know of 25 people who bought windows 7 to replace vista or XP. I still have bruises from the XP people. They were a bit annoyed that I had to back up and reinstall their apps. They thought it would upgrade them to 7. For some reason the vista people where happy to hear the word format. They even wanted to format the hard drive more then once to make sure vista was gone.

    • I bet most of those using Windows 7 bought new PCs with it installed. Most people do not upgrade the OS their PC uses. And businesses as well as others who need to get work should wait until MS releases the first service pack before upgrading. Wait until MS fixes the bugs and holes.

      Falcon

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ewg ( 158266 )
      Who cares? Anything to get them a browser update.

    • Re:Good news for Linux (Score:5, Informative)

      by jasonwc ( 939262 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:45PM (#30291694)
      Well, I personally upgraded all of my machines to Windows 7 x64. I was an XP holdout after hating Vista's slow performance (pre SP1). I began using Win 7 after the Beta was released and used it regularly from RC on. Now both of my systems are running Windows 7 x64 - one Professional and the other Home Professional. The Win 7 Professional x64 copy was obtained via the Yale MSDN Academic Alliance network, and the Home Premium copy was free with the purchase of a Vista laptop (that I immediately upgraded to Win 7 RC awaiting the retail release.)

      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.

    • Compare to Vista (Score:3, Insightful)

      by xswl0931 ( 562013 )

      Assuming a similar number of people bought a new computer that came with Vista and it took 5 months to reach the same market share as Win7 in 3 weeks, I would say that a good portion of Win7 sales is on upgrades and not new computers.

    • Re:Good news for Linux (Score:4, Insightful)

      by westlake ( 615356 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @09:20PM (#30292598)

      I wonder how many of those are people who bought Windows 7 and how many are just people who bought a computer that came with Windows 7?

      The Win 7 Beta/RC broke 1% in September.

      Windows 7 was released on October 22nd. On November 30 it had a 4% share in monthly tracking and was averaging 5% in daily tracking.

      You could argue that a 5% global desktop share was achieved in one month of retail system sales.

      But to do that, you have to chop off the low end.

      The Win 7 netbook is only beginning to make its presence felt in places like Walmart.

      To my eyes, these numbers simply don't make sense unless you assume very strong pre-sales of Windows 7.

      The upgrade coupon and the retail box.

      The upgrade implies confidence in a DIY Windows system install or upgrade. It's an unmistakable vote for Windows.

           

  • Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by El Lobo ( 994537 ) * on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:10PM (#30290538)
    I can only speak for the university I work for. We have upgraded 8000 machines from XP to 7 after passing over Vista all these years. And boy are we glad we did.

    Yes, 7 is ***cheap*** for education.

    • Hey, can you please get some more educational institutions off of Windows 2000? ;)

      In all seriousness, while I'm a huge fan of deploying Linux in educational environments (especially Ubuntu desktops and departmental servers), I'd give just about anything to see IE6 finally die in fire. I run an educational resources site [classhelper.org], and about 10% of my visitors are still using it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dingen ( 958134 )

      Yes, 7 is ***cheap*** for education.

      Whatever the price, it will always be endlessly more expensive than Linux.

      • Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by El Lobo ( 994537 ) * on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:35PM (#30290876)
        Not true. With 7 we deploy patches, programs, policies, you name it via our Active directory with one click. We Linux is not so easy, and believe it or not, time IS money.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Corporate Troll ( 537873 )
          At our company we have our own repository, with signed key. How is that hard?!?

          • Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by El Lobo ( 994537 ) * on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:50PM (#30291080)
            You don't understand the power of Active directory policies/software pushing/network structure id you **think** that a repository can do the same. But hey, the happiness of the ignorance is a good thing.

            • Re:Well.. (Score:5, Funny)

              by Nerdfest ( 867930 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @08:16PM (#30292018)
              That sounds disturbingly like "If you only knew the power of the Dark Side".

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Shikaku ( 1129753 )

          You can't set up your own repository? Really?

          Because that's what Linux calls it, before Windows copied it.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by El Lobo ( 994537 ) *
            Calling AD software pushing a "repository" is like calling a Ferrari a bike. Sure, both have wheels.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jim_v2000 ( 818799 )
            You obviously have no clue what Active Directory is. There is no equivalent that I've seen in Linux.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by gbjbaanb ( 229885 )

              Active Directory is a MS-standard LDAP server. Like OpenLDAP. You can use LDAP to store your users and login to your linux machines using it as the password store.

              However, the OP doesn't understand what AD is, as he thinks it pushes software to clients amongst other things (network configuration?). To get those features you need to buy more server software from MS, like WSUS or Systems Centre. There are similar things available for Linux too (eg a repository for updates, Puppet or CFEngine for client config

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Trelane ( 16124 )

          We Linux is not so easy, and believe it or not,

          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: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by JSG ( 82708 )

      Oh dear I bit.

      > 8,000 students * {student turnover period} shown just one OS. Will they see anything of Open Source apart from Moodle?

      Now that's an education for you.

      Incidentally, there are many Open Source OSs that have a cost of next to nothing but a value way beyond ***cheap***

      Why do you think 7 is ***cheap***? It's not altruism, it's good business sense for MS to practically give away software for education.

      As a matter of interest, can you tell me what you have really gained from moving from XP to

      • Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by El Lobo ( 994537 ) * on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:48PM (#30291052)
        They are giving a tool. They run and use the programs they want witht "their" OS. That is education for you. What we cannot allow if the maintenance nightmare that woulb be having 345527 distros in evrey machine. THAT is a nightmire. A REAL one.

        And what we got with 7? Are YOU kidding or are you just one of those fanboys that don't ever botter to see beyond the pretty interface of a OS?:

        Much better Active directory integration

        Accessibility improvements. Microsoft has revamped the accessibility features in Windows 7 with improved speech recognition and a new Magnifier utility with full-screen and lens-mode views.

        Action Center. While previous versions of Windows included a feature called Windows Security Center that monitored the various security features of the system, Windows 7 takes this functionality to the next level with Action Center. In addition to monitoring security, Action Center also monitors the OS's maintenance features and consolidates alerts from numerous Windows features into a single interface.

        Aero Peek. This replacement for Show Desktop in Windows 7 lets you "peek" behind all of the open windows on your desktop and easily view and Windows Gadgets or files on your desktop. You can also peek into the contents of specific open windows.

        Aero Snaps. By dragging open windows in certain ways, you can "snap" them to the edges of the screen, maximize, or minimize. This obviates the need to click tiny onscreen elements, making these features more accessible to users.

        Backup and Restore. Windows Vista's stellar backup and restore features have been streamlined and simplified in Windows 7. Like its predecessor, Windows 7 supports both data backup and image-based system backup, but now the UIs are more segregated.

        Bitlocker To Go. The full-drive encryption feature that first debuted in Windows Vista has been updated in Windows 7 to support removable USB storage devices like flash memory drives and portable hard drives.

        Blu-Ray support. Windows 7 natively supports Blu-Ray optical discs and enables you to write to Blu-Ray recordable media.

        Device Stage. This Longhorn-style user experience will be made available for multi-function devices such as smart phones, multifunction printers, portable media players, and the like. Through this UI, you'll be able to access the features that are unique to each device. Each Device Stage page can be extensively customized by the device maker.

        Devices and Printers. This activity center provides a central location for interacting with any hardware devices--digital cameras, mice, displays, keyboards, and the like--that may be attached to your PC.

        DirectAccess. This feature is aimed at business users who need to securely access corporate network resources while away from the office. Essentially a simple replacement for VPN connections, DirectAccess requires Windows Server 2008 R2 on the server-side.

        DirectX 11. Windows 7 includes the latest version of the DirectX multimedia libraries.

        Display improvements. Windows 7 includes numerous improvements related to computer displays, including integrated display color calibration, improved high DPI support, ClearType, and improved support for external displays. A new Windows Key + P keyboard shortcut helps you easily switch between connected displays.

        HomeGroup. Microsoft has consolidated the most common network-based sharing tasks into a single simple interface called HomeGroup. Computers in a HomeGroup can easily share documents, digital media files, and printers over a home network.

        Internet Explorer. Windows 7 ships with the latest version of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 8.

        Libraries. In Windows 7, Microsoft has realized a long-term goal to replace the static special shell folders from previous Windows versions and replace them with virtualized shell locations that aggregate content from a variety of physical locations. Libraries are implemented as virtual folders and the views

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by aj50 ( 789101 )

        The same thing that everyone who moved from XP to 7 gained.

        Windows 7 is nicer to use in almost every respect. The new taskbar (which is the best use of desktop compositing I've seen), the improved Alt-Tab window and the searchable start menu are the things that jump to mind most readily.

        If we're talking about real, demonstrable gains, the move from 2000 -> XP was far more questionable.

        I will happily admit that I can only comment on this from the user's perspective, I don't know what changes were made bet

  • That article was basically a graph [hitslink.com] in text form.

    • Whoever constructed that graph should be ashamed of himself. Perspective does not belong in a line plot.

  • How on earth do you accurately measure OS installations. I only say because I think the Linux/BSD/other non MS/Apple OSs are probably under represented. For example like a few other people, I stamped an ext{x} shaped boot on the ntfs partition on my computers.

    Those computers officially run some sort of Windows but there is no Windows on here but I'm sure my PCs are counted as running Windows by Dell/HP et al.

    Sadly - for balance - I can't point at a machine that came with Linux pre installed and had it rep

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sznupi ( 719324 )

      Sadly - for balance - I can't point at a machine that came with Linux pre installed and had it replaced by Windows.

      There are lots of such examples. In recent years they were usually cheap laptops bought in not-quite-mature markets (think "post Soviet block", of that I'm certain)

      Those machines often have some nonfunctional copy of Linux (doesn't even boot to X for example, doesn't have drivers for the hardware). Sometimes they are blank...but with Knoppix live-DVD included, so they arguably are also Linux machines... Well, one major (really major) PC manufacturer usually adds FreeDOS, so at least those machines are exclu

      • Sadly - for balance - I can't point at a machine that came with Linux pre installed and had it replaced by Windows.

        I can. Remember all those Lindows boxes that Walmart sold? Most of the people I know that bought them installed Windows on them. They either planned to install Windows right away or got fed up with the 'fake windows' that wouldn't run their software and subsequently installed windows. I think Walmart selling crappy low end linux boxes pretending to be Windows boxes did a lot of PR damage to Linux.

    • Yeah, statistics are kind of interesting, but you have to try to keep a clear idea of what they're really saying. I guess these are measurements of the share of web traffic each OS has according to some measurement of web traffic. Is it done with unique IPs, in which case NAT could caused skewed statistics? Is it doing it by cookies? Which sites, exactly, are being monitored? Is it being treated like a random sample and used to extrapolate data? Is there an attempt to account for people who might not

    • It looks like the statistics come from internet hits. If that's the case, then the numbers wouldn't be skewed by which operating system was bought on the computer, only which one's being used on it.

  • To be expected? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Monkeedude1212 ( 1560403 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:16PM (#30290628) Journal

    I mean, the headline makes it sound like Microsoft isn't do so well, but the full summary suggests that Apple is the one lowering its Market share to Linux.

    I mean, Considering PC's have the most market share, anyone who doesn't use Windows is essentially using whatever their alternative is (OSX/Linux) to get AWAY from Windows (Especially Vista, that pushed a few people I know towards a Macbook).

    So, was Windows 7 expected to Rip all thsoe Happy Mac customers back to Windows? Or was it majestically expected to make Linux users go insane?

    Windows Users use Windows, and Windows 7 will only grow from the market share of other Windows operating systems. It'll be a long while before Mac and Linux users go back to Windows, and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse will be just as stumped as I will be.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

      Exactly. Windows 7 is good enough to keep me using Windows if I buy another Windows machine. I was running the RC on my old Thinkpad and it actually had decent performance. Unfortunately, I reinstalled Win XP and, well, I don't care what anyone claims, XP is still faster on older hardware (and yes, I turned off all the eye-candy stuff on the thinkpad). However, if I bought a new machine today and it came with 7, I'd keep it, unlike Vista.

  • From the summary:

    For each copy of Vista replaced by Windows 7 during November, more than six copies of XP were swapped out.

    Well duh! That's because there are more than six XP users per each Vista user!

    • Probably true.

      I will say that going from XP to Windows 7 is a much larger leap than going from Vista to Windows 7... if you're already running Vista, you already have pretty much everything in 7 except for the new Start bar. Vista users probably feel less pressure to upgrade due to that.

      • Probably true.

        I will say that going from XP to Windows 7 is a much larger leap than going from Vista to Windows 7... if you're already running Vista, you already have pretty much everything in 7 except for the new Start bar. Vista users probably feel less pressure to upgrade due to that.

        Well, I think it is even simpler than that.

        Unlike the crowd here, MOST people run whatever comes on their PC.

        People who buy new computers (you know, ones with Windows 7) are more likely to be replacing an older computer (more likely one that shipped with XP) rather than newer one (with Vista).

        Thus the Windows 7 systems are mostly replacing XP. Why this is news is beyond me. Now if it was the other way around, I would be very surprised.

        -Em

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by heffrey ( 229704 )

      Vista has around 20% of market so your statement is clearly wrong in quantative terms at least. XP users are more likely to upgrade because their machines are old. Not much point upgrading from Vista to 7.

  • how is this news? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Carbaholic ( 1327737 )

    Certainly how is it bad news for microsoft? It's just saying that people are upgrading from XP to 7

  • Net Applications confirms it.

  • Spin (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ildon ( 413912 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:45PM (#30291014)

    Why is this being reported as some kind of loss for Microsoft? Isn't this *exactly* what they wanted? XP users who didn't switch to Vista to switch to 7?

  • Trend is viewable on Steam Hardware Survery (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Suiggy ( 1544213 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @06:48PM (#30291054)
    PC gamers are abandoning XP and Vista and moving towards Windows 7. For the first time ever since Valve began publishing their hardware survey back in 2003, Windows XP usage among Steam users has finally dipped below the 50% mark, and is losing ground relatively fast. Steam Hardware Survey [steampowered.com]
  • I could have sworn that XP's share relative to Windows 7 would grow once 7 was actually released. Because I'm Commander Cuckoo Bananas, woopwoopwoop!!!

  • Really. I just did a survey of all the computers in my house. Three were running Ubuntu Linux, one was running Windows Vista.

    That's a 75% market share!

    • Re:Linux has a 75% market share (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Belial6 ( 794905 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @08:18PM (#30292042)
      I assume you are only counting desktops. In my house I have 2 - Windows 7 Desktops 1 - XP nettop 1 - XP Media Box (XBMC) 1 - Linux Desktop 5 - Linux Wireless Routers (2 for a wireless to wireless router when I travel) 2 - Linux TVs 2 - Linux NAS 1 - Linux VOIP adapter 1 - Linux Phone (Android actually, but that sits on top of Linux) That puts me at 4 Windows and 12 Linux systems in my home, so Linux has a 75% market share here too. I would guess that there are a LOT more people running Linux in their homes than are counted or even realize it.

  • I think the recession plays a major factor in Apple's slight drop. Apple's smart in holding the line, however, since they don't want a large line of low margin products that will have heavy support costs. After the recession fades, they want to look consistent with their pricing.

    Also, I wonder if they counted virtual machines in the survey?

  • Linux is more succesful than the iPhone (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CAPSLOCK2000 ( 27149 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:44PM (#30291678) Homepage

    According to these numbers there are three times more Linux users than iPhone users. The iPhone is generally considered a huge success. Why is Linux percieved so differently?

  • Hear hear! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vegeta99 ( 219501 ) <rjlynn@gmai3.14l.com minus pi> on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @10:03PM (#30292912)

    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.

  • The answer is "Netbooks" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by joetheappleguy ( 865543 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @10:28PM (#30293086) Homepage
    Windows 7 Netbooks are selling pretty well, better than XP Netbooks did, and unscientific, anecdotal evidence indicates that a good percentage of PC users (Including laptop owners) are buying Netbooks to add to their "fleet".

    It's hard to argue with a $200 price tag.

  • Time to change useragent and add another "gain" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @11:41PM (#30293524) Homepage Journal
    So Windows 7 is "growing"? Sounds like I should "upgrade" by changing my general.useragent.override sometime soon, all those sites who do not work if you admit GNU/Linux as OS but do work if you are "using" Windows will probably start working great "using" Windows 7 sometime in the near future.

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