Reply to post: Re: All this shows me....

Windows XP's market share grows AGAIN!

thames

Re: All this shows me....

@Uffish - The issue isn't whether they can accurately count the number of hits their servers get. It's whether that count is an accurate representation of the entire population of the Internet. They're extrapolating their own limited sample sets of data to the Internet at large. The fact that the numbers from these two companies differ so much from each other shows at least one, and probably both, sets of samples are in fact not representative.

One major problem will be internationalization. How many Chinese, Russian, Indian, Indonesian, etc., web sites versus American and UK web sites are sampled by either of these companies? The proportion of Windows XP in use is believed to be much higher in the first set of countries than in the latter ones. How many users on business PCs using Windows XP are visiting shopping sites versus the proportion of Windows 8 users on home PCs? That will skew the numbers as well.

At best these numbers will show general trends. Reading meaning into hundreths of a percent though is both wrong and pointless. All we should be looking at is the general trend line.

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