It looks as though Microsoft’s bold attempt at overcoming the black eye it took over Windows 8 isn’t working. Adoption of Windows 10 is still sluggish:
The monthly desktop operating system usage share figures are in from NetMarketShare and they show that Windows 10 growth is slowing down as Windows 7 and Windows 8.x users stick with their operating system.
Basically, an eighth of the desktop computer market is sticking with XP come what may. The half of desktop installed base that runs Windows 7 is happy with it and doesn’t see much reason to change. Or they may be afraid of change. Windows 8 and 8.1 users don’t see Windows 10 as giving them anything they don’t already have.
The glory days of desktop personal computing are clearly over. Still, a lot of personal computers are being sold worldwide—more than $100 billion dollars worth. Most are not running Windows 10.
Microsoft’s share of the mobile market is about 3% and its presence in the cloud computing market about 10%. It’s got about a third of the server market. The company is dominant only in the dwindling personal computing sector. It may be forced to do something it hasn’t done in decades: compete.
What’s Vista, chopped liver? (It’s not listed in the graph, but another source puts Vista at 1.73% of current market, compared with XP at 11.68% and Windows 8.1 at 10.68%. Man, that didn’t do well.) My P.C. runs on Vista and will be replacing the P.C. within a few months.
We had XPs at my old firm and were in the process of getting new computers. There was nothing really wrong with them, but beside the security concerns, it seems to me that personal computers simply get “buggy” after awhile and need updating and its usually the most cost-effective to simply buy a new one. Those people holding on to ten-year old computers either aren’t using them much or practice very good hygeine.
You mean TWVTMNBN? (The Windows Version That Must Not Be Named) Or was that Me?
Amusingly, I’m running Vista Home Premium right at the moment. But I also run Win 7 a lot and Win 10 some and keep intending to do more with Debian 8 Linux. And I expect to continue using them all for some time to come. (I had Win 8.1; it’s the OS I gave up to get Win 10, and I don’t miss it at all.)
I don’t practice good hygiene, of course. I work at it — I back up all these OS’s partitions at least once a month, and I’m quick to reinstall when one of them hiccoughs. And it seems to keep me out of trouble.
There’s stuff to like about Win 10. I’ve high hopes for Cortana, or what that might turn out to be. There’s stuff not to like, such as not running Virtual PC and Norton Ghost and some other software I got used to with Vista and Win 7. And there’s some stuff that makes me go eh?, such as Edge and the new update procedures. On balance, though, it’s preferable to Win 8, and I trust we’ll see more software that makes use of its abilities.
Granted, in a better universe, MS would simply have put out a couple of new Support Packs for Win 7 and avoided the last few years of hullabaloo. On the gripping hand, I sorta see why they didn’t — new hardware keeps coming along (solid state disks, USB 3, 4K monitors) and not-so-new hardware keeps going away (56 k-baud modems, FireWire, 32-bit CPUs) — and at some point it makes sense to aim your OS at the hardware that’s there to be run. So I’m not weeping at the eclipse of Win XP, any more than XP users did when their crummy OS made my beautiful Win 2K obsolete. I’m even stolid about abandonment of the Linux 2.2 kernel.