Posted on 11/20/2021 10:31:28 PM PST by dayglored
Dayglored comment: Remember, this is about Corporate Business computers, most of which are managed by corporate IT groups and the uptake of new software, especially a new operating system, is glacially slow, often only happening when new hardware is purchased. Even so, 0.21% is notably low. The uptake on consumer/personal/home computers is, of course, much faster because consumers buy new computers much more often, and are much more likely to upgrade to the latest-and-greatest OS.
Microsoft's Windows 11 adventure is going swimmingly. IT asset management outfit Lansweeper has published the results of a 10 million PC survey that gives the new operating system a 0.21 per cent market share.
That is a good deal less than the 3.62 per cent of Windows XP and a nose ahead of the reviled Windows Vista. It is also not great news as the OS enters its second month of general availability.
App advertising biz AdDuplex put the figure nearer five per cent, although its survey was far smaller at 60,000 Windows 10 and 11 PCs. AdDuplex's data is also based on the approximately 5,000 Windows Store apps running its SDK.
Lansweeper's research comes from 10 million Windows devices, presumably in the business world, of which the IT asset management platform reckoned less than 45 per cent could take the update to Windows 11, thanks to Microsoft's stringent hardware requirements.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the Windows 11 rollout will take place over a number of months as Microsoft keeps an eye on what breaks and what doesn't. Users with compatible PCs running Windows Update could well receive a message promising the update is on the way at some point in the future. Or telling them that Windows 11 won't work on their kit.
That said, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that users are staying away in droves for the time being, and enterprises are highly unlikely to go near the code until a year or more after release.
Plus, the Lansweeper data threw up some statistics that could be more concerning than the snails-pace adoption of Windows 11.
Windows XP accounted for 3.62 per cent of PCs in the survey and Windows 7 was a hair under 6 per cent. Both are out of support, although Microsoft will keep security patches coming for the latter – at a price.
Even more disturbing are those mystery beige boxes in the server room that nobody likes to talk about. Windows Server 2008 accounted for 0.57 per cent of the PCs in the report despite also being well out of mainstream support. Even Windows Server 2003 was still hanging on in there.
With almost one in 10 Windows devices running end-of-life software, opportunities for miscreants abound.
Roel Decneut, chief marketing officer at Lansweeper, stated the obvious: "The situation poses a significant cybersecurity risk... Although the majority of users are on newer operating systems, the billions of active Windows devices worldwide means there could still be millions of people using devices that are insecure and open to attack.
"Plus, a large number of these outdated systems are predicted to be running on enterprise devices, which means it's not just personal information that's on the line."
We asked Lansweeper other questions about its research but have yet to receive a response.
Speaking about the discrepancy between his firm's figures and those of Lansweeper, AdDuplex CEO Alan Mendelevič pointed out that enterprises tended to be much slower on the uptake of new operating systems.
He told The Register: "Our data is highly skewed towards the consumer PCs (much more likely to upgrade at the first opportunity)."
"At any rate," he observed, "0.21 per cent seems extremely low overall. But could be totally reasonable if it's just from the managed company PCs."
We have asked Microsoft to comment. ®
I am still using XP. My photo program dates back to W95 and won’t run on anything later than XP. It does quickly and easily the operations I do with pix. I am not a photo fussbudget and am not interested in lying through photo manipulation and have not the desire to go through all the crap on Photoshop or other whizbang programs so I will maintain my XP so long as I can.
I got ransomware on both my machines, one XP and the other W10. I was able to remove it from the XP quickly but had to turn the W10 off for a week until it went away. Every new edition tries to hide the tools deeper and deeper.
Windows 10, Office 365 and Edge work together to provide a superior way to work. If you don’t do anything of substance with your computer I guess Windows 7 is ok.
The Win10 spyware was so popular because MS gave free consumer upgrades from 7. 10 would run (not particularly well) on old, slow computers.
For most folks, going to a suported Win11 is going to mean buying new hardware as well as buying a new OS licesnse. Win11 will get adoped at the consumer level as folks upgrade hardware - which will be delayed, as a lot of new hardware was sold on the front end of covid and is only a couple of years old at this point.
As for corporate - most will probably hold back until most of the installed base has been refreshed to Win11 capable machines. No one is going to be eager to support multiple operating systems when they don't have to (although a combination of WFH and BYOD has made that to some extent, necessary already).
(Typed on a Win7 machine.)
Even though I am now all Linux, I liked Win 7.
Ditto.
For what I do,win 98se was plenty. Only ‘upgrade” when forced by websites refusing connections.
No surprise the vac plandemic is modeled on Windows; Bill Gates is involved.
LibreOffice works good for me, while Chrome/Edge (Blink engine) is inferior in functionality to the legacy (Gecko engine) Firefox, though safer. Last I checked you could not even enable ctrl+tab in Edge to toggle btwn most recently accessed tabs, and it is very hard to tell tab from tab when you have many opened. Since one can enable multiple tab rows on Vivaldi (Blink engine) and Firefox Quatum I run Vivaldi and multiple installations (each having its own basic purpose) of Quatum portable, since that way I can still use Firefox legacy (ESR) as for FR. You cannot get this with the rest
Glory to God for such tools and options. And color.
Wrong comparison. They need to compare thus with the Windows 8 upgrade. If MS announced that the free Windows 11 upgrade would end in 2 months them there would be an exponential increase in adoptions.
Win 7 probably the best ever Windows (and I've been running Windows from before Windows public release..when it was used as a run-time over MS-DOS to be able to run MicroGrafx In-A-Vision).
But Win 11 may just "finally" push me over to Linux.
Unfortunately, the wife works from home and her work machine needs Windows, so I will probably be dragged kicking and screaming....
Running 11 on an older HP Elitebook. Works just fine.
Yep , download Win 11 iso and burn it to a USB using “Rufus” pick extended installations from the drop down and Rufus will remove all those restrictions and win 11 will install on almost any computer ,LOL
I'm surprised at the low Win-11 acceptance rate. I'm sure that will number will be changing drastically in the very near future.
I was a mid level IT engineer for a ~5,000 seat enterprise in my final job before retiring. Windoze shop of course. I participated in many mass systems upgrades during my tenure there. They still had NT4 machines when I joined them in 2003.
The takeaway that stuck with me was that mass migrations are easy...if you don't care about your users and their data. We got really good about using automation to remotely flatten boxes and lay a new OS onto them, complete with a host of default applications. What wasn't as consistent was the successful migration of user's data from the Before state to the After state - a real sore point for me personally. Having to face the customer and tell him his stuff is irretrievably gone sucks!
I sat through many heated discussions where management found themselves mediating arguments between the super-nerds who were fashioning the automation tools that made mass migrations possible and the street-level techs like me who had to deal with the fallout of users losing valuable data. The eventual (partial) solution centered around user education, encouraging users to store data on network drives. Network storage got ridiculously cheap and it didn't make sense to be constantly chasing individuals to clean up their personal hard drives.
There are a couple options that are a great compromise and you can have both so you are both set up. You can very easily and safely install both on the same machine and use either as you like as dual boot, or what Linux calls “Alongside”.
Or what I have been doing for folks is make an external USB hard drive with a fully functional Linux OS with storage as it’s own independent system and it just borrows the physical hardware when booted.
I prefer the second option because if the internal default windows OS ever goofs, you can boot into the external Linux drive and still go access the windows drive volumes and retrieve the data from being lost if you have to format and reinstall the windows. And this also isolates the windows from the Linux as separate drives.
Even though I am Linux on my machine I have several external Linux drives that I can grab and go and plug into any other machine I like and borrow the physical hardware, even MACs. Just have to make sure the BIOS is set to boot from an external USB device. One is 2 Tb and will hold anything I will ever need it to.
Another thing that is kind of cool... I have three full Linux operating systems installed on my external 2Tb drive stacked on top of each other. I can choose from any one of them to boot into as I like. It is like having three different computers on one drive. If one goofs I can boot into one of the others, go grab my files from the goofed one, and then just remove that whole complete install. Similar to how a Virtual Machine would work, without needing a virtual machine application. :)
Roger that. We've gone to having fairly small on-board storage, and laptops rather tan desktops that hold lots of disks, and the network shares have been the answer. Backups are easier too since we (IT) have continuous access to the shares.
Win11 is the new-hardware vendors' Full Sales Quota Act. And not just the TPM2 requirement. Enterprises aren't thrilled about having to budget a few hundred grand (or a few million) to buy new hardware just because Microsoft says "Jump!".
Glad to hear of your good fortune; may it continue unabated. :-)
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