Windows 10 now rules the weekend, taking over from Windows 7 Windows 10's market share continues to grow a point or two a month, but it's also cracked the milestone of being the most-used version of Windows on weekends. That's The Register's conclusion after downloading the US Government Analytics service's latest 90-day dump recording over a billion visits to US government web sites. …
Numbers don't lie--people do. But I don't believe real (intelligent) people really like Windows 10. It's only the ones that think they got something for nothing using it anyway.
Except for those like my least-skilled friends who said "I didn't want it, but it just started being Windows 10. So how do I get my printer to work again?"
As it turned out, we had to download Vista printer drivers because they let us choose a have-disk option and load drivers that actually worked.
Or in my case it was, "I have to upgrade because I keep getting that security message".
There aren't enough people who 'work with computers' to stop everyone else updating. Not when no means yes and you get a full-screen update prompt with a huge 'Update' button and a tiny 'don't update' piece of text in the corner.
Or in my case it was, "I have to upgrade because I keep getting that security message".
The living-room laptop had that disease until I finally got annoyed enough to find and run a "never10" (or some such) free utility on it, which shut it up by patching registry. The other Windows 7 laptop in the house got the Linux treatment.
The first one would have been Linuxified as well, but I need one WIndows machine to run my negative scanner that has no Linux driver.
The first one would have been Linuxified as well, but I need one WIndows machine to run my negative scanner that has no Linux driver.
If it's up to it, try creating a Windows VM in Virtualbox, and you can allow it to see the USB devices somewhat natively (assuming your scanner is USB).
And though I've never tried such a thing you may find Wine happily handles the software. (I've tried WINE on many things, just not hardware stuff)
"But I don't believe real (intelligent) people really like Windows 10. It's only the ones that think they got something for nothing using it anyway."
I was thinking something like that as well, that a preponderance of millenials actually *LIKE* Win-10-nic [seeing nothing wrong with the adware/spyware/flatso/metro/start-thing], perceive it as "another freebie", and are just busy searching for more gummint handouts on the weekends [and thus the traffic shows it].
after all, the millenials have been CONDITIONED ALL OF THEIR LIVES to expect a free lunch, instead of doing what prior generations have done, i.e. GET A JOB so you can BUY IT.
What I like is the latest STATCOUNTER, which shows a DIP in Win-10-nic, and a BUMP in Win 7, even across a weekend!
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-weekly-201531-201635
numbers don't lie, yeah.
It's going to be very interesting to see what happens. The post "free upgrade" period has yet to show in any monthly statistics. The masses of people who we know were continually rolling back to 7 were more than balanced by the new upgraders (as shown in the continuous increase in 10 market share). Now, though, there won't be very much upgrading, but the rolling back to 7 could still be going on unimpeded.
If you'd bought Windows 7 licenses by the thousands when they were at their cheapest, you could make a fortune now. Microsoft's most popular and in-demand product is one they refuse to sell.
We all have seen the stories about the PC industry being in a state of decline, and MS is not helping. The perceived inevitability of 10 undoubtedly serves to convince some people to get off the Windows platform entirely, and a lot are not ready to embrace Linux.
I'll never use 10 in its current form, and the odds that it will improve enough to make it usable seem to be exceedingly remote (it's getting worse, not better). Fortunately, I am not one who is unwilling to embrace Linux, but it's disheartening to see MS destroying the Windows platform that many people equate with PCs.
The market has segmented:
a) "Consumers" have moved/are moving to phones and tablets.
b) "Creaters" are staying with the PC Platform.
Therefore: Windows, on the PC Platform, should be optimised for "Creaters".
Redmond are delusional if they think they can recapture the "Consumer" market with their latest desktop bloatware.
The "Consumer" boat sailed a long time ago:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-os-ww-monthly-200812-201608
The PC Platform is reverting to a "niche retail market".
That will leave "Apple Stores" and "Phone Stores" in the Retail Parks.
The "Repair Shops" in the suburban strip-malls will increasingly "fail-over" over to Linux unless Redmond changes direction.
The "Dumbing Down" of the desktop to make it more "User Friendly" has made the desktop less efficient/productive.
The move from Mouse+Keyboard to Touch is not a productivity gain for businesses unless they are employing low-skill "screen monkeys" i.e. cash register operators and managers.
Redmond appears to be a classic case of "Managers" becoming detached from business reality.
No wonder the "tech sector" increasingly relies upon the Share Buyback Scam to keep afloat.
" Windows 7 licenses can still be bought for £8. This price point tells us it's not a huge market."
I'd have to see more about that. I seriously doubt that actual (non-pirate) MS licenses are selling for £8. If you head over to eBay, you can see that boxed Windows 7 editions with intact product keys sell for quite a bit more than that. The price has fallen since the Windows 10 upgrade period ended, but it's still considerably higher than £8.
Then there are the sellers who somehow just have a "legitimate" product key to sell, sans COA, disc, packaging, or anything else; all you'll get is a product key emailed to you. If you look at the total number of these product keys these vendors have sold, you can see it is quite a lot.
All of this is happening while MS is doing its best to promote the idea that 7 is dead. The average person has no idea that Windows 7 (in any form) is even an option now... they think 10 is all there is, and they get excited if you tell them that it is still possible to set their PC up with Windows 7. They want Windows 7, but they're not out looking for it, and the prices for Win 7 licenses in the secondary market are not reflecting the true number of people who would take 7 over 10 if they knew how to make that happen.
That would not be the case if MS itself was selling 7. If it were sitting there on shelves in computer stores like Windows 10, and if it was preinstalled on computers like Windows 10, it would be a whole different animal.
Windows 10 only sells at all because it's perceived as inevitable. If people wanted it, MS would not have had to engage in trickery to get people take it for free. Side by side with Windows 7 as a commercial product, it wouldn't have a chance. The name "Windows 10" is at least as toxic as "Windows Vista" or "Windows 8" were in their respective time frames, and deservedly so.
If MS itself was selling 7, that would not be the case. There is a lot of demand for 7 that's not being
I'm more curious to know why there was an NetMarketshare upsurge in XP in July?
Was it retro month and nobody told me?
If that's just down to "statistical error", the magnitude of change for Win 7, 8 and 10 aren't far outside that either.
Personally, I finally ended up with Win 10 thanks to a new laptop, I've only had it as a VM before now for software testing. I'm not greatly impressed. Classic shell improved things, mainly by getting the start menu back to a Win 7 style desktop and not a tablet inspired frenzy of tiles (Microsoft, just give up, Metro was a failure, just remove all traces, at least from desktop installs!). I've had more than a few BSOD thanks to drivers exploding (wasn't that supposed to have been fixed in Win 7?), and the damn desktop icons keep sorting and aligning themselves to the left, even when all those options are turned off. Alarmingly I found reports of this bug dating back to 2015 in the betas.
And yes, that bar graph is hideous.
They sure do lie. Especially how they are counted.
Microsoft’s figures are a world apart from NetMarketShare’s, which in July showed Windows 10 on just 21.13 percent of the market globally, way behind Windows 7 on 47.01 percent.
A big reason for the difference in numbers comes down to how they are recorded. NetMarketShare records actual OS usage (based on web browsing), while Microsoft records the number of devices Windows 10 is installed on. These include tablets as well as PCs, and the figures include devices not yet sold in shops and warehouses. Microsoft also only records Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, while NetMarketShare includes both XP and Vista.
I think "Involuntary Suppository" is a better analogy.
Yes, but only because it hints at a painful reality: it still takes you bending over yourself before it's possible. I really have no time for people whinging that W10 has borked this, that or the other, it's not like there is an absence of track record here.
There's only so much padding you can put on a wall when people insist on running full tilt at it - at some point you have to just let them.
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This is a lot less to do with people 'adopting' Windows 10, more due to the majority of new laptops coming with 10 pre-installed. The large lead Android has, again, is down to the ratio of phone and tablet sales to those of PCs and laptops.
Most home users are only concerned with getting an appliance that runs Facebook/Twitter/Skype or whichever piece of twattery is currently de jour. The OS behind it all doesn't come into the reckoning.
I'm assuming you didn't do much Googling? A quick search for 'Lord of the Rings Online Linux' brought me to Playing In Linux Under Wine
It even seems to have a Gold rating on the WINE App Database
Going by the graph it looks like the sum of the bars is fairly steady. Also summing up the tables has NetMarketshare showing a slight increase in Windows usage, 85.98% in June to 87.52% in August and StatCounter a slight drop from 79.07% to 78.52% over the same period.
At least one of the answers is standing there in the table and also the reason I am using Win10 on this laptop the decline of the unloved unwanted 'stinky' win8 which is overtaken by the ancient XP OS. A lot of people like me took the free upgrade to expunge 8 from their lives now that period has ended I wonder how the next upgrade will go if users find themselves with a Win8 box . I think the availability of Win7 licences might skew the numbers or perhaps more people would dip a toe into Linux distros the least likely option is buying a copy of Win10
Android devices outselling Windows devices by nearly four to one. But Windows 10 is clearly on the rise and more of us will soon be in the OS-as-a-service world, just where Redmond wants us to be.
This is a glaring example of a logical fallacy along the lines of: frogs are green; I am green therefore I am a frog.
An increase in relative terms (market share) does not mean an increase in absolute terms. Indeed, as the market share of mobile devices increases, the number of people using desktop machines decreases (absolutely and relatively). So as people switch from Windows to IOS or Android, and they are, the market share for Windows 10 might go up even if fewer people are using it. That said, 1 year in and even including the compulsory distribution on new machines (with the odd exception) and strong arm update tactics, the uptake of Windows 10 is far from impressive.
From my own numbers I'm watching a growth in mobile from around 15% in 2015 to over 20% in 2016. But don't believe me: have a look at Akamai's data, which El Reg persistently fails to refer to, along with its own data.
I have no idea why Mr Sharwood thinks data from US government websites is any more representative of global trends than data from El Reg. I suspect the answer is that he simply doesn't have access to El Reg's stats. This would be very poor for a tech website if it were true.
>> I have no idea why Mr Sharwood thinks data from US government websites is any more representative of global trends than data from El Reg.
I would have thought it was obvious - the only people that visit el reg are folks in IT or with an interest in IT. That's a pretty small % of the population. Its also a more tech savvy population, and would heavily skew the Linux numbers up from the rounding error it is today. But I guess that's the point, innit?
Windows as a service will fail. I look after most of my friend's computers/laptops etc. Every single one who has W10 hated it, but tolerate it with classic shell/all apps deleted and no start screen/all connections set to metered in the registry to stop forced updates etc
Not one of them wants adverts, or would be willing to pay any sort of subscription whatsoever.
One upgraded to win7 from winxcreable (or winxecrable if you prefer) one from vista to linux mint. Should show up in next month's figures.
To what extent do these figures represent the "new laptop back to school/college" phenomenon as well as the end of the free upgrade? The major retailers seem only to offer winx with the odd win8.1 as OS.
Well the Win10 numbers are about to reduce by one user, unless I can find a way to:
a) stop Windows restarting with updates whenever it damn well feels like. Just tell me you need to restart and let me do it, like every other version of Windows. Don't give me the option of "use this schedule, or don't get updates".
b) stop Windows reinstalling the "you don't have Office 365" app whenever it does an update. I'm perfectly fine with Office 2013 thanks.
I'll worry about my next OS when Windows 7 support runs out.
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