The April numbers are in!

BunnyJ · 02 May 2016

I wonder where the OP got those numbers from? In the news section you're supposed to supply a link at least.

EdTittel · 02 May 2016

BunnyJ:
The original poster got those numbers from Market share for mobile, browsers, operating systems and search engines | NetMarketShare, which routinely updates its desktop marketshare by version pie charts for the preceding month on the first day of the next month (so April went up yesterday on Sunday, May 1). I, too, go along with Fafhrd to find the numbers from the US government a bit more representative of the reality I find myself in. Thanks also to Fafhrd for rescaling the numbers and translating them into pie chart format. Good job!
--Ed--

Mystere · 02 May 2016

jimbo45 said:

Hi there @Mystere --there's still some very good reasons why XP is still being used ---particularly as VM's. There's still a huge amount of very expensive Lab / Medical /Engineering type hardware out there which is incredibly expensive to replace and has long life times --for example some heavy manufacturing control tools might last 40 years or more and cost hundreds of thousand of dollars to replace. The original manufacturers may long have stopped making the equipment, gone out of business or been taken over by somebody else so newer drivers etc won't be available.

While that may be the case, the vast majority of those won't be visiting websites that NetMarketShare monitors on any kind of regular basis.

And thus, they would never be counted.

Vince Massi · 02 May 2016

Explaining the numbers:

NetShare represents the entire world, not just the US. China and many developing nations use XP because they can't afford to upgrade, nor do they really need to. We use one of the top-rated banks here in Mexico, and they use XP.

Fafhrd, your statistics are accurate, but they only represent traffic on US Government websites. Even Uncle Sam acknowledges that they do not reflect world usage. And I do not believe that 1 out of 20 computers upgraded to 10 in the last month, as the charts show.

As Fafhrd and Jimbo correctly explain, Vista IS a good operating system (What?!?) if your machine is powerful enough to support it. Designed for dual-core, 64-bit systems, Vista started out as an 32-bit XP upgrade and ran into major problems. Way back then, some off-brand company built a low-end Vista laptop that ran well. It had a dual-core CPU (unusual at the time) and was built from the ground up for Vista.

What is "Other" or "Hidden"? I suspect that some are Win 10 machines that have managed to cover their tracks. Win 98 and OS IX are still out there. Believe it or not, there are a small number of OS/2 Warp (under a different name now) and FreeDOS rigs out there. Also, there are a small number of mainframe computers out there.

Bunny, you're right. I was supposed to post the link. I apologize and will do so in the future.

lehnerus2000 · 02 May 2016

Mooly said:

I suspect many on here wont know about the major problems that Vista users have been experiencing for the last 9 months or so, beginning with Augusts updates. The problem is near lock up of Vista machines when checking for updates with CPU and RAM usage pegged at maximum. Unconfirmed rumours blame Microsoft for diverting server resources away from Vista. Whatever the reason, I too can confirm the problem is real. Update checks can take anything from 3 to 6 hours to complete. Nobody knew what was going on at first, but then all the reports and clues came flooding in.

The same thing has been happening to W7 machines too.

It took ~16 hours for my W7 laptop to get April's updates.
It only took ~30 minutes for my W7 desktop to get them.

Fafhrd said:

XP has probably bottomed out like Vista and 8.0, and will linger on with the surviving hardware that supports it. When that is no longer easily renewable it will disappear into some black hole, invisible to the rest of the Internet, but I bet there will still be hardware running it 20 years from today, doing some tasks that nobody will know how to write the software for, using modern technology of that age. I bet some managers have stockpiles of motherboards, processors and memory for exactly that contingency.

There will be XP VMs.
Some old games won't run on W7 (or later).
I was just using my XP VM to play Civ III.

I have XP installed on my other desktop, so that I can use Windows Live Photo Gallery.
WLPG goes berserk if you try to run it on W7.

Fafhrd · 02 May 2016

The US Gov stats were taken from the period over ~3 Months - the mean figures for February and the means for April. 1-2% per month for upgrades seems reasonable to me. And the '3% from 7 and 2% from 8.1 to 10' seems feasible too. When NetMarketShare can increase market share for XP in one month is cause for concern. Heres the change from February to March and March to April:

The April numbers are in!-march-april.png

https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/windows.csv

Now I bet a lot of traffic from outside the US also visits US Gov sites. Ok, not so much home users, as much as commercial and international press and Government analysts from overseas. In fact about 60% comes from overseas, while the USA sleeps, dropping to 20% during the US daytime:

The April numbers are in!-2016_05_03_07_21_281.png

Me, I have 3 multibooting PCs in use, and 2 have XP volumes which get an outing about 1 in every 5 days, 7 and 8.1 get almost no use now - they will soon be recycled in favour of 10.

OS/2 (not necessarily Warp) certainly still in ATMs. It was a better OS than NT in its day. In 1994, Big Blue was multitasking DOS, Windows 3.11 and native OS/2 on 486s with 8MB RAM at PC trade event demos. NT was being crashed on just starting up by MS technicians on demo machines with unheard-of 24MB specifications - we could all see the RAM being clocked up on the POST screens amid the laughter.

VMs have their uses, but don't hack it when the OS interfaces to specialist hardware, which the VM knows nothing about. Which modern systems even have serial or parallel ports any more?

Trust_No1 · 02 May 2016

Mystere said:

Yeah, NetMarketShare has been horribly wrong for a very long time.

XP is not at 9% by any other comparison, unless you're counting china, and even then i'd doubt it. XP's share has been well under 2% for a long time.

Some of our government agencies are still running Windows 95, here, we reclaim/recycle our soda/beer/etc cans. One day the recycle machine broke down, and the tech opened up the door and there it was, the little screen that was rebooting windows 95. I was shocked, I suspect many businesses, are just like that. I know many small business owners that run XP and they see absolutely no reason to switch, it does everything that is needed. Honestly, XP was a pretty good little OS.

With that said, I still think with the so-called free option and how hard MS has tried to force people into switching, I am not really impressed by the numbers. It is like comparing apples to oranges.

lehnerus2000 · 02 May 2016

Comparing both charts, there is:

An agreement on the W7 market share change
A disagreement about the W8.1 market share change (-0.4% vs -2%)
An even bigger discrepancy with the W10 market share change (+0.2% vs +5%)

Vince Massi · 03 May 2016

The discrepancies have two causes:

NetMarketShare analyzes world-wide use, while the second chart only analyzes visits to US Government websites. According to the first chart, about 3 million computers world-wide (out of about 1.5 billion) either switched to Windows 10 or were Win 10 computers that replaced other computers during April.

And while the first chart only covers one month, the second chart covers three months.

While an open website will receive visitors from all over the world, the US Government has acknowledged that its numbers do not represent actual world-wide usage.

TechnoMage · 03 May 2016

If anyone is running their OS of choice, do they really care what market share group they're in?
As a casual observer, I'd have to say, "I doubt it!".

As was previously mentioned, in many cases, changing to a new OS can/will represent a tremendous financial outlay.

It was only just a very few years ago, that I noticed that the hundreds of terminals (PC's) at the VA Hospital had been upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. Now Win-7 has already been scheduled for the old Bit Bucket, by Microsoft. Will those old PC's, built for Windows XP, run Windows 10, or the Next Big Thing? I has me doubts!!

As I see it, the only entity that gains anything from a new OS is the company that wrote it. For the consumer, it's a total financial loss.

OH, did y'all know, that the last upgrade to the Hubble Telescope, swapped out a 386 cpu, for a 486 cpu. Talk about someone being behind the curve. !

Cheers mates!
TechnoMage