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Windows 10 Gains 14% Desktop Market Share in 2016, Edge Continues to Struggle (petri.com) 280

From a report by long time Microsoft watcher Brad Sams on Petri.com: With 2016 now behind us, we can take a look at how far Windows 10 has come thanks to usage-share with statistics from Net Marketshare. At the end of December for 2016, Windows 10 is installed on roughly 24.5% of devices whereas, at the end of 2015, the OS was only installed on around 10% of machines. During the same period, Windows 7 declined from 55.68% to 48.34%, Windows 8.1 usage dropped from 10.3% to 6.9% and XP dropped slightly from 11% to about 9%. Also, released alongside Windows 10, is the company's new browser, Edge. While the market share of the desktop OS has grown steadily, Edge has not performed as well. At the end of 2015, Edge obtained a market share of 2.79% and at the end of 2016, it has climbed to 5.33%. But, Chrome, which had a market share of 32.33% at the end of 2015 now commands 56.43% of the market. During the same period, Internet Explorer dropped from 46.32% in 2015 to 20.84% in 2016.
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Windows 10 Gains 14% Desktop Market Share in 2016, Edge Continues to Struggle

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  • So what? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by barrywalker ( 1855110 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @07:34PM (#53594755)
    It's still a turd of an operating system.

    The only reason they can show higher adoption numbers is because they FORCED it on people.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Snotnose ( 212196 )
      Yup. Win10 uptime is well under a week, figure 3-5 days before a reboot. Typically a reboot that happens while the laptop is closed and your snug in a rug sleeping.
      Got the uptime up to 3-5 days by realizing I could restart Windows Explorer when it crashed, which it does 1-2 days in.
      Win10 is the buggiest, most unreliable PoS I've run in decades.
      Did I mention I "upgraded" from Win 8.1 to 10 because I was installing something, and Microsoft took that millisecond to put up the "Pssst. Hey bud, wanna up
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Linux user here. I have Win10 installed on a tablet and also on a full-time, always-running virtual machine. Seems pretty stable and solid to me. I don't like how settings are dumbed down, and I'm not a fan of constant communication with MS (I have everything turned off that I can). Overall I am much more impressed with Windows 10 than I thought I would be. It's pretty solid, if ugly (hate the flat, white look).

        No idea what you are talking about with having to use html formatting. CR twice to start a

        • Time between reboots has so much to do with what is installed and running - my clean Win10 machines only reboot when updates make them do it - and I use them to do programming and browse the web extensively. My home Win10 machine with special touchscreen drivers that runs various 3D CAD packages in addition to heavier animation (kids education) web browsing seems to benefit from a reboot about once per 20 hours of work, if it's just sitting there doing basically nothing, it doesn't need to be rebooted, eit

          • Rebooted my Linux home server the other day, it was up for 475 days and went through multiple updates in that time. Only rebooted it to install a new kernel. This is typical, actually. Linux desktop machine uptimes are usually months, laptops are only rebooted if they run out of power.

        • by dbIII ( 701233 )
          Set a few dozen people loose on machines with MS Win10 on them and you'll find that "pretty solid" is a rare description of the thing.
          You have been not just lucky but also helped by the very conservative choice of hardware that is emulated by virtual machines.
          The device drivers all work for you.
          For other people on real hardware, sometimes not so well at the moment.
      • My windows 10 install is up for weeks at a time. It's even a clean install. It was a upgrade from 7 to 10 and its been rock solid. I imagine you are running on crappy hardware.

        Oh and why the fuck do you have to put html code in here? It's because that is the way it is, deal with it.

        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          My windows 10 install is up for weeks at a time.

          So what do you do if you have processes that must live longer than "for[sic] weeks"? I remember participating in a forum discussion where someone mentioned having to keep information for incomplete orders in an open program on a PC connected to a UPS. The information provided by a customer couldn't be written to disk for legal reasons, as the orders were for something tightly regulated such as insurance. Nor could it be discarded for marketing reasons, as the customer expected to be able to pick up where he

          • by dbIII ( 701233 )

            So what do you do if you have processes that must live longer than "for[sic] weeks"

            MS Win7 or MS "server".

      • by stooo ( 2202012 )

        Use Linux.

    • Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:11PM (#53595103)

      That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

      Personally, I will not move to Win 10 before I can block updates indefinitely and I can turn off spying ("telemetry") reliably. If that does not happen, then I will go to one gaming-only Win10 machine, no email, no browsing, no non-gaming uses at all, and a Win7 VM for Office with no network connection on a Linux basis. Everything else will be Linux, which I use for a lot of work already anyways.

      • Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @10:45PM (#53595423)

        That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

        I think it's more likely that 15% was gained during the most egregious cases of Microsoft pushing it really hard on windows 7 users (i.e., clicking the red X doesn't cancel the upgrade, or outright removing the red X) and doing other dirty tricks that are quite mean to their customers, like upgrading without any prompt at all and then you can't cancel until 10 is already installed and running where it shows you an EULA, then after you refuse the EULA it downgrades back to 7. Each operation is quite dangerous for the typical PC user because when things go wrong, (and they do) they usually can't fix it, or even be able to google a fix. But, Microsoft doesn't see a problem with that, as it went on all throughout the first half of the year. After that was over, the quarterly gains Windows 10 saw were very tiny, usually 0.5% +/- 0.15%

        It will probably take two years or so before 10 sees a 30% market share, it will likely be until 2020 that it sees 7s current market share.

      • by antdude ( 79039 )

        Why game in W10? Just play in older Windows versions, Linux, Mac OS, etc.

      • by nnull ( 1148259 )
        I've already made that move. The only problem is that for me and you, it's not a big deal, for others it is difficult to get used too.
      • That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

        But that is standard practice and has nothing to do with the level of turdness of the OS. I don't know of anyone who upgraded an OS, except for a few people who found Vista so poor that they welcomed Windows 7 on to a pre-existing machine.

        New OS comes with new PCs. New PC rates are slowing down so it stands to reason that figures are poor. The vast majority of people don't know Windows 10 is a turd and so are ambivalent about the "upgrade".

    • Internet Explorer quit starting up on my IT dept. maintained laptop - that will kill your usage statistics in a hurry, if the program stops functioning on mass maintained fleets of PCs. Chrome works just fine there, even though it is not supported and IE is.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        OS400 for the win!

        Or IBM i, or whatever they call it these days.

      • For me the problem is with Windows 10, in particular the user interface of it. It is a PoS, completely inconsistent as if it had been handled by dozens of developers where each of these developers had a radically different idea.
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by jez9999 ( 618189 )

          And all the "help" icons in the corner, instead of opening up a proper help application with info on the current page, simply open up Edge with a Bing search for "Windows 10 help". That made me LOL.

    • When it comes to turd OS adoption announcements they really don't mean much either.
      You could say for example that the number of people that couldn't take it anymore and slit their wrists is up 14% this year over last.
      Or perhaps the number of people that jumped in front of the train after Windows 10 self installs and then crashes your HDD and deletes all digital memories of their poor deceased mother is on the rise.
  • by snickers ( 36112 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @07:35PM (#53594761)

    I've just moved to Windows 10 for work and and Edge just doesn't run on my machine. It opens and then closes straight away. Googling the problem has shown it appears to be affecting a reasonable number of users. I can't be bothered to spend more than an hour trying to fix it.

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @08:04PM (#53594873)

      I can't be bothered to spend more than an hour trying to fix it.

      Neither can Microsoft, since they let their QA department go. /rimshot

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The outsourced QA. That's what the telemetry is for - why run it in their office and pay people to shake the bugs out, when they can run it on your computer and will you find all the bugs for free?

    • more than an hour

      Wow you would spend up to an hour trying to make a Microsoft Webbrowser work? What mental institution did you break out from? Can't you just download the Chrome installer on another machine and transfer it via USB stick?

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @07:36PM (#53594763)
    giving away Windows free of monetary cost, and using what seemed to be malware-like tactics to trick Microsoft customers into installing Windows 10 even if they did not want to, Window 10 has less than a 25% marketshare?

    .
    Surely this cannot be seen as a success, even by the rose-coloured glasses that Microsoft PR usually looks through.

    It is a colossal failure.

    • What percentage? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @08:30PM (#53594953) Homepage
      What I'd like to know is what percentage of the machines running Windows 10 were stealth upgrades, and how many of those weren't reverted because the users either didn't know that they could go back to their old system or were afraid to try.
      • That's a great question. This whole Windows 10 disaster is a supernova black-eye for Microsoft. It will be a long, long time before Microsoft will have earned back the major trust they lost. And mea culpa blog entries buried in the holiday season are not the way for Microsoft to earn back the lost trust.
        • I realised something a few months ago that I think a lot of people haven't picked up on yet:

          Nadella's Microsoft isn't really about Windows and Office any more.

          Sure, they'll take the money and make a few billion on those, but his vision really is almost completely detached from Microsoft's historical desktop strongholds. That's why, despite plenty of us being skeptical about how well they'd do with Windows 10 following on from Windows 8 and Office not really doing much different to ten years ago, they're act

          • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:39PM (#53595215)

            ...Nadella's Microsoft isn't really about Windows and Office any more....

            I would agree. With a caveat.

            It's not about Windows anymore. But Office may still be in the picture.

            Office is the stranglehold that Microsoft has on its corporate victims. The future of Microsoft is Azure, but Microsoft needs to keep Office around to force its customers to stay with Azure instead of another cloud provider.

            If Microsoft can lure customers to Azure without the lock-in of Office, then maybe a Windows-less Microsoft has a reason to be profitable in the future.

            • by swb ( 14022 )

              I hear so much talk about the future of Microsoft being Azure, it also kind of seems like the future of electricity generation being fusion. The march continues to the goal line but he goal line keeps moving, leaving you closer but no nearer.

              VM workloads are still fantastically expensive on Azure and nobody seems really interested in database as a service functionality due to the immense lock-in. Network bandwidth from most buildings is just too expensive to get the throughput necessary to offsite signifi

    • Look at the market share trends for the first half of 2016 when it was still a free upgrade for many users, and then for the second half when it wasn't.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @07:38PM (#53594771)
    he who lives by the Enterprise Management tool dies by the Enterprise Management tool. More and more I have to put users on Chrome because the numbskulls who manage their domain profiles have cranked IE's security settings so high nothing works. And there are so many esoteric settings buried in the registry good luck finding the one causing your JavaScript to go haywire. But they let 'em install Chrome. So I get to have this conversation a lot:

    Me: Does it work in Chrome?
    Them: Yes.
    Me: Wanna spend 8-16 hours of your life figuring out which of the 800+ settings it could be that's breaking IE?
    Them: No.
    Me: Use Chrome.
    • You're in trouble when someone actually DOES want to spend that time, and you still can't figure out the problem.
  • Edge is a POS (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2017 @07:39PM (#53594787)
    When I launch a browser I want to start using it immediately, not after it has pestered me about some bullshiat I care nothing about. It is insanely frustrating to have Edge ignore the fact that I am typing a URL and have it take me off to some recommended shiat page telling me how much better Edge is than its competition. Quit trying to sell me on your walled garden web experience and stay out of my way, you imbeciles. Your UI includes a Stop button for a reason. The fact that it doesn't work when you are cramming your shit in my face only serves to piss me off.
  • by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @07:51PM (#53594827) Homepage

    I want to believe MS has competent design managers working for them. Maybe they are being micromanaged to the point of irrelevance, but I want to believe that after 20 years of trying to make a decent web browser they'd achieve success...or lacking that, they'd fail because some idiot manager keeps fucking them up.

    Because damn...I'm embarrassed FOR them. How do you not put out at least a baseline capable browser by this point? Multi-billion dollar company who's spent 20+ years in the market, and they still fuck it up.

    • Maybe they are being micromanaged to the point of irrelevance, but I want to believe that after 20 years of trying to make a decent web browser they'd achieve success...or lacking that, they'd fail because some idiot manager keeps fucking them up.

      Apply that same thought pattern to the crap that is the latest version of Firefox...

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Edge is a great example of how not to develop software. You can see very clearly what has happened.

      Under the hood it's actually quite good, does well with standards compliance, is reasonably secure and fast. On top of that the UX people built something that ranges from mediocre to annoying, with the most touted features being little more than gimmicks. Then management really screwed it up, ticking boxes like "had sync capability" without bothering to check if it's actually useful to most people, and demandi

  • My Xmas present to my parents - remove that piece of shit MS Windows 10 off their laptop and restore MS Windows 7 on it.

    The utterly braindead MS Windows 10 installer decided to run itself on an i3 machine with 2GB of memory. That made the machine totally unusable despite Firefox and Skype being the only programs used.

    Changing it to MS Win7 gave it a usable interface that doesn't change or put ads in your face. Putting in 8GB of memory did the rest.
  • by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @09:05PM (#53595083)

    Downgrading to Windows 7 was the best thing I have done to my desktop.

    Windows 10, even a year after its original release, had signs of being a beta product at best. One problem I have been struggling with was the machine's CPU eventually constantly at 30-40% use with no obvious causes. I have tried all of the half-baked canned answers from Microsoft, including disabling/enabling/changing AV, disabling Microsoft services, and even wiping out and reinstalling the OS.

    The next issue is with the updater. This damned thing simply eventually stops working. It shows there are pending updates, starts the downloads, but then sits at 0%. I have tried every canned answer provided on the Microsoft forums, including resetting the update components and wiping and reinstalling the OS.

    And finally, I am not fine at all with an OS that decides to reboot the machine whenever it likes. It's downright dangerous to leave any work open. I have been caught off guard by reboots a few times.

    • And finally, I am not fine at all with an OS that decides to reboot the machine whenever it likes. It's downright dangerous to leave any work open. I have been caught off guard by reboots a few times.

      Your computer is just practicing radical freedom. [existentialcomics.com]

    • One of my major issues with Windows is the constant reboots for updates and a very slow shut down / start up when updates are being applied. It has happened several times for my colleagues (on Win7) that their presentations were interrupted by a forced update that could not be cancelled. Why can't updates in Windows be as smooth and easy as in Linux? Stuff can be updated in the background, not extra configurations / applications of updates during start up or shut down. Disclaimer: I manage my own work comp
      • by dbIII ( 701233 )

        Why can't updates in Windows be as smooth and easy as in Linux?

        Because it's not designed that way. It's a feature that was not considered important.
        Maybe MS Win11 or whatever number they choose next will have better ways to deal with file locking and library versioning to bring it up to date with what *nix and VMS had before WinNT ever existed, but for now it doesn't have that.

    • I'm so conflicted about your post. On the one side you look like a shill, (someone on Slashdot wants Windows Update to work? Nice try!), but on the other side you're not promoting the product.

      I'm so confused.

  • Edge needs to fix its bookmark toolbar. You can't arrange your bookmarks by dragging and dropping them. And the limitations on bookmark text because they still are NTFS file system files needs to die. NTFS filesystem character limitations need to die.
  • and had declined for 4 years. Everything points towards continued decline for Windows sales for 2016. So 2016 will probably be fifth year with declining sales for Windows.

    As for Windows - they stopped selling Windows 7 and 8 in 2016 so well of course Windows 10 will continue to increase. Customer can't get anything else in the future.

    Android had 54% in 2015. So looks like mobile is the way to go.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • by tepples ( 727027 )

      As for Windows - they stopped selling Windows 7 and 8 in 2016 so well of course Windows 10 will continue to increase. Customer can't get anything else in the future.

      GNU/Linux is still available for desktop PCs, as is macOS for PCs made by Apple.

      Android had 54% in 2015. So looks like mobile is the way to go.

      Say I want to retire a luddite PC and use apps to app apps. How practical is it to use AIDE or another tool on an Android tablet for developing Android apps?

  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Monday January 02, 2017 @10:31PM (#53595363) Journal
    Now that people have their OS with games and hardware for DirectX 12 support?
    As for browsers, support for blocking all ads and related malware is a trending feature.
  • The strong arm and bully people, and they have yet to reach a 25% penetration, less than 6% with their browser, which is the default that the illiterate masses won't be able, or won't care, to change. Well done, Microsoft; living up to expectations. Consider yourself, once again, middle fingered.
  • Whenever I here of W10 market share improvements, especially with people who rave about it. I just think, go ahead sheeple and get pwned by Microsoft, so long as *I* keep being able to use alternatives.. don't care if they get 95% market share with it.

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