Vista losing market share

Honestly, what's wrong with the following sentence?

"MICROSOFT'S GINGER-HAIRED stepchild of an operating system"

I installed Win7 recently, so I amy be part of that statistic.

Wow, what a surprise. This must surely be the ONLY windows release in history that has significant, pure performance enhancements.

My XP machine (P4EE/2MB 3.4Ghz machine with 3GB memory, GeForce6800 128MB) is so noticebly quicker that it is hard to believe.

Install was way faster than any previous windows version.
Boot is faster.
Shutdown is way faster.
Image activation and termination now seem faster, espec. termination.
Explorer file copying is better generally, and for multple file copies (better threading) it is way better.
The file system has improved and the massive problems with very large files appears to have been eliminated - I first noticed this on Win2008R1, though not sure when it was fixed actually.
The infamous graphics stall problem seems to be history.

These are purely subjective observations, but you all get the idea. So, who gives a FF about the user interface changes (not sure I like them all actually), when the "under the hood" changes are real and observable, not just measurable!

My prediction for Windows7 uptake is that it will be massive, and very quick indeed, assuming pricing points meet the market.

It seems at last MS has listened to the techies and actually looked at the fundamental OS problems and addressed them.

From my vantage point this would be a great release, even with zero user interface changes.

I still use my Hackintosh for computing on the road, but Win7 has extended the life of my stationary hardware, a welcome change from the software behemoth who usually couldn't care less about such things.

All this from someone who loathes MS and everything that it's corporate philosophy is, and all that it stands for. But ... credit is deserved here - pip pip.

ps: Internet Exploder 8 still sux.

I find it amusing that a yet to be released Microsoft OS has already claimed more market share than Linux.

Windows 7 1.52%
Linux 0.95%

So much for Linux replacing Windows on the desktop, yeah the Linux figure don't represent the endless single application devices out there running embedded linux, but they aren't PCs and they aren't running desktop linux so they don't count in the Linux vs Windows desktop war.

I'd say Microsoft has Linux beat this round atleast, better luck next time I guess.

I can see why so many people like windows 7, it is a big improvement over vista, but its still not as good as xp.
Hardware has gotten much faster but os has gotten much slower. Windows 7 is not as fast as it seems. And they got rid of only thing I liked about vista, windows mail. Windows mail did a very good job with spam. I guess that was to much effort for them to continue it. Windows 7 doesn't come with ms email, but it will.
The oem,s will install the over-bloated windows live pack on it.
I switched to Ubuntu 9.04 and i love the speed configure ability. I could be using windows 7 right now if I wanted.
I dont like the desssktop, the tool bar is too fat, the control panel is a joke and networking is a clunker. Xp beats it hands down so lets see how far windows 7 goes.I used to think computers where about speed, what happened? Most people think Microsoft is about Os, but there not, there all about how much money they can keep getting out of you. Thats there real goal.If that were not true why did they even out out vista when it clearly was a joke?

an entertainment OS for the living room, not as an OS to support IT operations or prof. apps. It was designed at the peak of the DRM mania, and I was flabbergasted to see the internal block diagrams of the DRM modules and checkpoints and forbidden routes for each and every running software bit. Amazing energy was invested in this, with the end result of a resource hog and annoying operation.
I certainly hope that in WIN 7, and it appears that way, MS has found a more resource-efficient way to interfere with running apps than what they did in Vista.

Why are you people still using net applications discredited statistics? I can make dodgy statistics up will you quote me? Sorry, but like net applications I can't tell you what my methodology will be.

@ Scott, I agree.

I am planning on a new laptop (Acer Aspire Timeline) but not until 7 releases, for better resell value to the mindless Windows lemmings out there. When I first get it I will make the restore disks and maybe play with it for a little bit but then it's wipe the drive and Ubuntu 9.10 (release date 10/29/2009) for me.
I am using 9.04 now on a Acer laptop and had 8.10 before that, Vista was booted very quickly off this rig.

XP? We run W2K: it's that most-recent stable version of Windows. Seriously: all machines have it here :-)

I'm Convinced that those who still say XP is better than Windows 7 haven't used Windows 7. Its like the people who refuse to use Bing. Once you use it for a while you find out that the only thing google does good is search and that everything else is second rate compared to Bing. I was a die hard XP user but I haven't found a single application that Windows 7 cant run and do it as well as XP. I'm even running games like Starcraft which is a Direct X6 game perfectly fine in Windows 7. Windows 7 Will run fine even on your old hardware that XP is running but really isn't it time you upgraded that TV tuner card and Scanner? I think people dont like it because its different and they cant as easily find certain items they could in XP but once you get past the small learning curve you will find Windows 7 has many options that you wont be able to live without.

Who do people care about boot times or shutdown times? Its about using the PC not a few more seconds saved coming up or going down.

MS tactic: Release a poop of an OS to lower expectations and then people will love anything you throw at them! Even if they pay 100-500 bucks for virtually no practical gain! Yay!

"I can see why so many people like windows 7, it is a big improvement over vista, but its still not as good as xp."

My subjective observation is that this is incorrect. It is also objectively incorrect at many levels. I specifically excluded the interface changes, which are more personal.

"Hardware has gotten much faster but os has gotten much slower."

My hardware is unchanged.

"Windows 7 is not as fast as it seems."

Can you supply some evidence to suggest why you think this is so? The examples I gave are immediately measurable, so some other examples please.

[Interface rants excluded]

" ... networking is a clunker. Xp beats it hands down"

My subjective experience does not support this statement. Can you provide some support for this assertion?

[more rants excluded]

Dweeb

Windows 7 is good but on my Samsung NC10 a tweaked XP install (killing off loads of services, not installing search, windows classic theme) is WAY faster than a tweaked Windows 7. And boy is my install of XP fast on the NC10. And I need it to be. Its a mobile PC for web, email and word/pdf. I want to switch it on and it be running ASAP. I dont care about how it looks.

I have an MSI Wind, but I run OSX on it.

The Graphics capability might have a noticeable affect on Win7 performance on that class of machine.

Now Is Time, Home Partition Server.Server 8988. Theres Solid Up
Grade Path NOW, When mere 30 Months Ago, NO Equipemnt EVEN Played Much Developed NAME LongHornae'. that White Brouse Chipped that STILL han't Gotten ANY Approval Nor OK, in fact was home server taken off Market? Its Best to Turn Wii Off.
von drashek

It's nice to see a lot of people take the bait.

I remember a lot of people saying Vista was going to be awesome. Then they all changed their minds and it became ME all over again.

..This is an MS product. I'll wait and see before I claim it's the second coming.

windows 7 just PERFORMS how vista SHOULD have. it still doesnt have the gates version of how a filesystem should be, and keeps the worst parts of vista - that which kills the vid and audio latency. This is NOT a platform for _serious_ work. XP is Still better.

[and dont think your games will be playable unless its no more than solitare]

So "serious" in your definition involves video and audio? OK, that may be true for you, but it is irrelevant for me. Personally I play games on a games console and don't consider them "serious" in any way shape or form. Ditto for video playback. Ditto for music.

I did not write that the file system was perfect, just that it was better, and VISTA is irrelevant really - I never used it myself.

Maybe Win7 is still a horrible DRM manic design (I have no clue because it's largely irrelevant for me and thus I do not care), but subjectively, the performance v. XP is enough for me to switch.

I prefer OSX for a user interface, but it is not an option presently for my stationary server.

Umm.. for a desktop, boot up / shut down / restore from standby / go to standby times are not such a big deal, mainly cuz most computer saavy people dont shut down their desktops.

But this is essential for laptops. I use vista simply cause it has better support for tablets (i have a thinkpad tablet) than XP does; if not for this, I would have wiped vista on day 1 and gone straight back to XP.

Try restarting a laptop on-the-go on battery in the airport or coffee shop, and watch as your computer takes 2-3 mins to shutdown, 2-3 mins to start up into the login screen, then 2-5 mins for vista to finish preloading into ram all the programs it "thinks" you'll use... you will go berzerk. that is why i hate vista and i hope to get rid of it soon for sanity's sake.

Well guys... I use 7 RTM (legal download from msdn aa) on my home desktop (4gb ram) and netbook (2gig o ram) and it's blazing fast on both of them.

I don't came from Vista, I tried Vista for 2 days, which was enought for me to hate it since then. Asa Windows 7 RC came out, I tried it. Wonderfull.

Boot time, resume time, desktop responsiveness, shutdown time, everything is as good as XP SP3.

I had to downgrade my work pc back to XP, I also used 7 RTM on it for one week, but I had some compability issues with one of our in house programas.

It's hard to get back to XP sp3 after using 7.

ps.: Im building a Core i5 in the next week to replace my home pc, it's going to be 7 for sure.

Yeah, 20 bucks for the RTM (final version), 32 AND 64 bits Professional.

I got it from a academic program. anyone with and .edu mail can get it from win741.com for 30 bucks...

It's worth the money. Every 20 bucks of them ^^

Windows 7 is better than XP. End of story. I should know, I have dozens of PCs and laptops, and also all manor of Macs.

HOWEVER

Those who know how to tune XP (as has already been said above) can make their computer absolutely fly. Whether is is a netbook or gaming PC you can make XP boot in seconds. Windows 7 is a league above but for now at least XP will remain very strong.

I have an older Acer Aspire One Netbook. I was a die hard xp fan. I installed the win 7 beta just to have a look. I surprised my self when I decided to leave Win7 on it. It isn't any slower than xp if you turn off Aero. That's on a 1.6ghz Atom with no discrete gpu.

To all the people who say "When I installed Win7 on my old WinXP box, it ran way faster," try re-installing WinXP on your old WinXP box first and you'll be amazed at how much faster a fresh install runs. As most of us know, your OS collects junk over the years that can really slow it down, so comparing a tired WinXP install to a fresh Win7 one may not be fair.

Dear Jon,

Like so many posters on the internet, you fail to read or to grasp what is written before you. You simply use your opportunity to post, without engaging your reading facility and subsequently your mind.

My post #2 in the thread, has clearly escaped your attention. The items I specifically mentioned have absolutely nothing to do with whether I have a fresh install or not.

While your shotgun comment is not directly false, it is only marginally relevant to the discussion.

Read and absorb.

I referred to elements of Win7 which are, at an abstract technical level, vast improvements over XP, and make a noticeable (not just measurable) improvement in performance.

The netbook poster rightly observes that these are very important elements for portable machines - part of the reason that an *ix based solution (Ubuntu, OSX etc) typically is a more pleasing user experience.

I might try Win7 on my netbook for fun, to see how it runs - but I cannot imagine using it over OSX.

Dweeb

Ok, but what is the median age of the computers in the survey? Anything older than 3 years won't have Vista, nor will Netbooks or business users who still run XP.

"Only" 19% sounds bad, but with computers having longer useable lifespans these days it's perhaps not as bad as it seems.

Anyway, win7 is good, but it's goodness vs. Vista is over-rated. Some re-scheduling tweaks to make it seem faster on boot-up, some genuine improvements, but it's still "mostly Vista" on the inside. "Seven good, Vista ba-ad" mantra is as stupid as it sounds.

Dr. Dweeb, you hit it right on the head...As much fun as it is to just thoroughly trash MS when they do things wrong (which unfortunately has been way too often with the amount of influence they exert), credit must be given when due; I have a wonderful homebuilt overclocked XP system, and a home-built dual-booting Win 7/Vista,on 64-bit with a ton of memory...Windows 7 is fantastic and will make even diehard XP fans like me ecstatic... Unfortunately,Dr. Dweeb is still right about the other part too:
IE 8 is just awful compared to everything else out there; that is simply the truth, too.

does it also factor in hackintoshes in the increase of mac on net apps out of those 5%?

...Microsoft can’t be bothered providing an upgrade path from XP to 7? It’s like they’ve given up hope on converting the lion’s share of their own users, and concluded that the only serious market for Windows 7 upgrades is that modest-sized pool of dissatisfied Vista users.

I've worked out how MS work. Every 2nd release is the "Gold" they were aiming for but ran out of time. The trend is that there is a shorter gap between the releases when they've missed the mark, and longer for the 'good' ones. The 'good' ones also get an embedded version.

Lets look just at the NT side of things to make it simple:

NT3.x - July 1993

Ok at the time, didnt really make that much of a visible dent. That said, up until a few years ago, the Commonwealth ran NT3 on their banking systems (or appeared to be) so it did make a dent. Its entirely possible that its only the age of this OS that has led me to believe it didnt leave a huge mark. I do believe that it was because it was the first release and Netware was so ingrained at the time. There were 2 fairly major updates in the 3 years between 3.1 and NT4. To me this shows how unfinished it was.

NT4 - July 1996

Almost complete dominance of the lower end server market and widespread corporate workstation adoption. Service life 6 years and more.
Not the most logical OS, not even the most stable, but for the most part it was a workhorse. Once you had it running, it would just simply work for the most part. The hard part was in the making it run. Ah the good old days - I'm sure many here can remember supporting this little beast. Once you got used to the way it did things, it was actually fairly simple even if it wasnt intuitive.
Embedded variants still running in many weird and hidden places.
The Coles checkouts were still NT4 embedded 3 years ago for example.
Extended well beyond the expected support boundries. Coles checkouts all run USB. Expect to see this one in odd places for a long time to come.

2000 - February 2000

Fairly widespread adoption, but due to XP coming out not too long afterwards, many corporates and users delayed the process. Compatibility was an issue for some at the time. Programs and drivers were not ready. The OS also had substantial issues early on. It didnt feel finished when it was new. Probably because it wasnt. Time was of the essence in the late 90's. With Y2K being a HUGE story, and a wild money spinner, they had to basically release what they had at the time. This led to 'Windows ME', and 2k feeling like they took the most core parts that worked and cut the rest. Amazingly they still released it after the critical date.

XP - October 2001

Felt like the OS 2k was aiming to be. Like they tried hard to meet this point but ran out of time. Astounding level of success. Some complained of stability issues, and bugs that they said servicepacks fixed, but honestly, I've been using it from beta 25xx and not had issues.
It has basically taken over the world to date. Even today it's still the #1 OS for home users and corporate. Microsoft have been forced to extend its servicable life many many years beyond their target. It's also likely to remain the gold standard for 32bit windows period. With the addition of XP mode into Windows 7 XP is going to be with us for a long long time.
It is still the most common version. It outnumbers Vista, now 3 years old significantly. It has almost complete dominance 9 years after its release. This is unprecedented in computing history. It's also a sure sign that the industry is maturing. It was around the release of XP that hardware and software hit the point of "good enough". A top of the line PC built in 2001 running XP, would, with a ram upgrade still be reasonable today. Take the EEEPC 701 for example. Aside from the screen, the 630mhz processor (circa 1999 spec) is adequate.
Its somewhat amusing to think that because this is more or less just the finished version of 2000, we're really running a 10year old OS.
Embedded versions wont lose support until well into next decade. Like NT4 it will remain the workhorse for obscure systems and outdated applications for a long long time.

Vista - November 2006

Another unfinished release. I commented to a few people a year or so before Vista was released that its biggest competitor would be XP. I Love being right. From early on the OS was troubled. Delayed releases, features being cancelled, and an industry that was slow or unwilling to provide the driver foundation required led to what can only really be described as a stillbirth. Avoiding opinion, it was obvious to anyone who looked that side by side, XP was faster and less annoying than Vista. Manufacturers demanded to be able to sell XP over Vista, early netbooks could barely run it.
I expect Vista to fade quickly. Some time in 2017 the last person running Vista will call a helpdesk somewhere much to the amazement of the operator.

I have never run Vista, but every time I have used it, it has been frustrating. It took half an hour to share files on my housemate's PC so that XP would open them. A 2 minute operation in every version of Windows since the dawn of time. That's not the only bizzare networking issue I've come across.

7 - ETA October 2009

So far very impressive. It feels like the target Vista was aiming for. Because they've had another 2-3 years to refine and polish it, it actually works! It works WELL. It works FAST. Side by side testing and subjective observation have demonstrated it to be markedly faster than Vista. It's been comparing favourably to XP in benchmarks too. It WILL run on netbooks. It will run fast on netbooks. Personally I've had a slimmed variant (2.5gb) on my standard speed eeepc 701 (4g) and been impressed by the performance.

Obviously Microsoft even think it's good. Off the top of my head, I dont remember any other fully public beta.
I am now running the 64bit version on this PC. A 4yo dualcore Athlon64 with 2gb of ram. Nothing amazing, but its performance is only slightly noticably slower than XP's was. There is mention that the later versions running better again. Also due to things like XP mode, and the general timing, this is the first one I expect to have widespread 64bit adoption. It is also expected to have an embedded version.

So there you have it. Every 2nd attempt is good. This is a trend dating back over 15 years.

Jon, I reinstall my XP every 3 months... So I know how a fresh install o XP work... and it's not a vanilla XP, it's one prepd with nLite, no superfluous services, and bla bla bla...

I still think 7 is better than a fresh tweaked XP install, be it on netbook or desktop.

Yes; Vista is losing market share, and to the still-unleased Windows 7. However, it's *not* a reflection on any supposed lack concerning Vista. Among that one percent plus of Windows 7 desktops are two that previously ran Windows Vista - Mom's P4 Northwood-B desktop (upgraded from Vista Ultimate 32-bit) and my own Celeron DC desktop (upgraded from Vista Ultimate 64-bit). Why were both upgraded from a pretty-satisfactory Windows Vista? Simple, really; Windows 7 is better. It supports more applications being run at once (stability when multitasking is better). Driver stability is much improved. Driver availability is also better. It's that simple; when you build a better operating system that doesn't require you to trade in your hardware OR your applications, folks will switch.