Posted on 01/01/2019 7:47:26 PM PST by dayglored
More than three years after its release, Windows 10 has passed Windows 7 in market share. That means more desktop computers are now running Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system than any other OS, according to Net Applications. The milestone is a nice way for Microsoft to end 2018, even though the company surely was hoping it wouldn’t take this long for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 7.
Windows 10 adoption started out very strong, but slowed quickly as the months progressed. Microsoft was aiming for 1 billion devices running Windows 10 in two to three years but backpedaled on that goal.
The operating system was installed on over 75 million PCs in its first four weeks and passed 110 million devices after 10 weeks, 200 million in under six months, 270 million after eight months, 300 million after nine months, 350 million after 11 months, 400 million after 14 months, 500 million after 21 months, and 600 million after 27 months. In September, after 37 months, it passed 700 million devices.
Windows 10 had 38.14 percent market share in November and gained 1.08 percentage points in December to hit 39.22 percent. Windows 10 market share growth has been slowed ever since the free upgrade expired in July 2016.
Windows 8 slipped 0.05 percentage points to 0.88 percent, while Windows 8.1 lost 0.14 points to 4.45 percent. Together, they owned 5.33 percent of the market at the end of December. The duo’s peak was 16.45 percent back in May 2015.
Windows 7 dropped 1.99 percentage points, falling from 38.89 percent to 36.90 percent. This is what made it possible for Windows 10 to become the “most popular desktop OS” in December. Windows 7 overtook Windows XP way back in September 2012, and passed the 60 percent market-share mark in June 2015.
Windows Vista doesn’t even register anymore (it fell below 1 percent market share at the start of 2017, the month of its 10-year anniversary). Windows XP somehow rebounded 0.31 points to 4.54 percent.
Windows overall slipped 0.83 percentage points to 86.20 percent in December. Year over year, Windows lost share, from 88.51 percent in December 2017.
Between November and December, macOS gained 0.94 points to 10.65 percent while Linux gained 0.70 points to 2.78 percent. Year over year, macOS was up from 9.02 percent share and Linux was up from 2.12 percent share.
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. This means it measures user market share.
If you prefer usage market share, you’ll want to get your data from StatCounter, which looks at 15 billion page views every month. The operating system figures for December are available here.
Same here. W10 is speedier than W7, has more features that are useful to me, and has been rock solid on all my machines for three years.
The "Start Button" you see on Win10 is -not- the Start Button we'all had in Win7 -- it's not "just like earlier versions". It's a con job, put there after the incredible fiasco of Win8/8.1. Microsoft made a big deal about "We're putting the Start Button back" but in fact the Win10 version does not do the same things, or behave the same, as the Win7 Start Button. Classic Shell goes much further in replacing the functions Microsoft removed in Win8.
That said, do I "need it"? No, and as an IT/SystemAdmin I deal every day with stock Win10 systems at work successfully, if maddeningly. That's my job. They pay me to do that, so I do that.
Whereas at home I prefer to have something more sane.
One of my specialties is in Technology Lifecycle Management. The bank I work for now had a DEC VAX cluster when I started the bank in 2007. That DEC VAC cluster ran components of 138 different mission critical applications on it, for no other reason than someone knew that platform, new how to write and run those components on it, and therefore used that platform to do it.
Keep in mind almost every other organization in the country with DEC VAX's got rid of them by 1994/1995 and the mindset of the bank was "if it's not broke, don't fix it."
Problem was they were spending almost $1.8 million per year keeping the damn' thing running and the business users hated it, while they simultaneously refused to fund moving off that platform. A perfect example of what you're talking about.
My first assignment at the bank was to figure out what it would cost to move off the platform. After talking to the I.T. and Business folks I quickly figured out this was larger than just a funding issue, this thing put the bank's brand reputation and regulatory compliance capabilities at severe risk.
As we're a high wealth management financial services institution, can you imagine what would happen if this thing went down and we couldn't get parts for it? (Believe it or not, parts were no longer made for this thing and parts availability was pretty much limited to eBay!!) If clients knew that their wealth was being partially managed by a system that was 14-17 years outdated they'd pull their assets from the bank and move them elsewhere. The Fed's upon hearing we had the thing would put us in the "risky" category and that's just for starters.
I tucked this information in my back pocket and then went and talked to someone in our Finance department and asked how the bank depreciated this thing, paid for it's ongoing support, figured out those two costs then did a net present value calc on the 14-17 years of money the bank pissed away supporting this thing.
Four weeks after starting at the bank, I presented my findings using my Advertising Agency experience having come from that industry with 10+ years of experience and within 45 minutes convinced the bank to finally fund getting rid of the damn' thing. I used five categories including brand reputation, regulatory compliance, technology risk and others to show the bank what their REAL risk was, beyond just funding.
No one had done that for them before. The most embarassing part to the bank was the net present value calc of the money they'd wasted keeping that thing running and showing them how they could've dramatically modernized their other platforms simply by eliminating it.
Here's the best part, it was cheaper to eliminate it than to keep it running, payback was immediate and all 138 application's components were completely re-written and moved to supported platforms without purchasing a single operating system license, a single mb of disk space, a single server, or adding other software licenses.
The entire effort took 8 months to complete and the Senior Management who'd made the decision to keep that thing running all those years were gone within 18 months.
I'll be at the bank 13 years this March.
BTW: I haven't yet mentioned the betting pool that Senior Management setup unbeknownst to me that was betting I'd fail as three Consulting Firms and several other employees failed at eliminating the platform. It was a hoot to hear it existed and to hear who bet against getting rid of it. Those are the same people who are gone from the bank and who were thoroughly embarrassed when I exposed how much money the bank wasted over the years supporting that platform and running I.T. down to the ground as a result.
Today we're as modern of a financial services operation as you'll find including being in the cloud and using modern fault-tolerant application platforms such as Cloud Foundry, Docker Swarm and more. That's not just because of my efforts though I did help start that trend. The bank realized how they got into that mess and began hiring more forward thinking management and people from outside the bank to begin the modernization process. This was a culture that was very steeped in doing things the same way over a long period of time and it quite literally took several efforts such as mine to kick-start ushering that culture to the door.
Thanks for your post.
MS needs to refund part of the fee for Windows 10.
MS has broken things that worked tolerably well in Windows 7. They should be improving, not destroying.
1- the search facility. Lousy in Win 7, lousier in Win 10. I downloaded a search program, for nothing, which works well.
2- scroll bars that are not visible until you mouse over them. You don’t know where to put your mouse cursor until you mouse over them. Dumb. Time and mental energy lost.
3- for the PC edition, when the initial screen comes up upon booting, there is NOT A WORD on what to do next. Nothing. To fix it, display the simple message: “Swipe up on touchscreen, or hit SPACE BAR, or hit ENTER, to see logon screen.” Not hard, Microsoft!
4- the most annoying one for me. When copying a file, and a file with the same name is about to be overwritten, the dialogue does not tell you which file is newer or bigger. You have to display “more information.” This was OK in Win 7 and before. Why did you break it, Microsoft?
5- numerous instances of moving things to an unexpected place. Now I have to hunt for it. Minutes wasted. It is stupid that I have to do an internet search before I can find the thing that I want, whose location I knew very well under Win 7, but no longer know.
A migration guide for every version would be a good idea. A cheatsheet that shows you how you must now do things. Not hard, Microsoft!
We had a Production Solaris machine that had one (1) spare power supply. We couldn’t find another one. We were told “We are going to Linux. Figure it out quickly”. Luckily, it was unix. Except for encryption (PGP to GPG), it was the same.
I got a call recently looking for a COBOL/CICS/VSAM programmer. I told her to check the Assisted Living places.
Insurance company.
I use a fool-proof method to avoid getting hacked
Inquiring minds, and grateful FReepers, would love to know your one WEIRD trick for avoiding hackers. At your earliest convenience, please advise your toll-free phone number and what credit cards you accept, to share this incredible method. /s
PS, if your original post was sarcasm, please disregard this post and accept my apologies.
Tested and approved to be an almost exact Win 7 replacement with many more options, features and 1000 times better security. And it is all free.
I am kicking myself for not making this change over many years ago. Have any curiosities ask away.
Wow, the more you know. Someone should forward that to AARP.
Meanwhile, I’ve only ever had one virus, and that because I curiously clicked on a file hiding in my Eudora/attachments folder. Those days are long gone now.
Noscript is your friend, as well as avoiding those risky clicks.
Got a link? If the patches work, wonderful news.
Linux Mint...
I am still running lucky # 7.
Since I took my first computer programming course way back in 1961 on a IBM 7070 Mainframe computer, only programs I use now are all my own programs. All have built in tons of security. And they do not work on 64 bit OS. I don’t need any external drivers for my money management programs.
The SMB and RDP vulnerabilities in unpatched Windows don’t care whether you wrote your own program. The machine is open to those who have the (freely available thanks to the NSA) tools to access it.
I just didn’t want you to brick a new laptop trying to install an OS that likely won’t have hardware driver support.
You might consider some freeware like VMPlayer so you can run an older OS on a hyper visor and not worry about the underlying OS/hardware as much. At least then you can isolate the machine from the internet.
The other thread didn’t have instructions, just some Freeper said he’d found them, but it was a registry entry.
In post 24, tomkat gives instructions via the services config dialog, which is weird. I don’t have any WX installs at all, so I have no personal experience to draw on, but everything I’ve ever read seemed to indicate that updates were mandatory. But....if it’s just a service you disable via the normal means, what’s the big deal?? You have to do that in W7 anyway.
Now, the other issue is if you can disable (and provably, not just trusting an MS setting) telemetry. If there’s a way you can turn that off, and KNOW/PROVE no information is heading back to the mother ship, then I MIGHT consider downgrading to WX after 2020. Might.
Good advice. For example, I can run MS-DOS 7 (from the Win98SE distrib), or NetBSD, on an Apple MacMini, using VMware. (Don't ask my why; but I proved it works.)
One caveat: You won't have access to newer/fancier hardware devices in the host machine, unless the hypervisor software has drivers for them, and can do a proper translation down into the guest OS.
I depend on 25 years of using the internet with zero problems of stealing money by hackers. If my system has worked for 25 years, it should be good for another 10 years or so, at which point I will cease all investing transactions and all my money will be in annuities paying a monthly check in the mail.
I snicker and laugh when my electric utility asks me to create security questions! Why? I have full permission to anyone who wants to steal my electric utility login password. What will they do with it? Pay my bills?
PLEASE SEE MY POST #59.
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