Graph? what graph?
The first graph is nowhere to be seen (using Chrome)... thought it was an AdBlock glitch, tried without it: same. Tried with Firefox: same.
Windows XP's market share took a dive – a big one – during October, according to the two counters of OS market share we've been following for a year now. Netmarketshare had XP going from 23.97 per cent of PCs to 17.18 per cent during October. Statcounter had XP going from 14.4 per cent to 13.22 per cent, a less dramatic drop …
So the number of XP machines being used to browse whatever sites are signed up to their ads is down compared to Win8.
The number of XP machines being used for real work inside corporate firewalls and not browsing ad-packed websites is .....
In other news Halfords announce that the worlds most popular car is a 10year old Fiesta with fake XR3i badges and dummy turbo exhausts.
On the other hand, we completed our migration from XP in 2011, we now have around 70% W7 and 30% W8. Most of our customers have also already migrated. Our industrial touch PCs manufacturing was also migrated from XP embedded to 7 embedded at the same time.
I haven't used a PC with XP on it since 2007.
Try working in the public sector. I was at the Ministry of Justice last week training people on 10 year old software. All their laptops were running XP.
NHS is even worse.
Anonymous 'cos they've not paid the invoice yet (posted by snail mail as they don't take email invoices).
This post has been deleted by its author
Most corporate worstations are allowed to browse the internet so I don't think the XP "dark matter" is anything like as significant as you suggest.
You're also blindly assuming that all those "dark" PCs are running XP rather than Vista/7/8.x, in fact you're using the lack of data to argue this is the case which is hugely unscientific,
I wonder whether the top people at Microsoft feel pride at the fact that one of their products was so good that millions of people and companies are hanging on to it years down the line, in spite of all the improvements offered by the new versions...
Or perhaps they are saying to themselves: darn, that XP was too good, it's bad for our bottom line, we need to come up with something that's not so good, to make sure that people are willing to switch over to the next best thing at the drop of a hat...
er...OK. I'll get my coat, sorry.
Only have one 95 machine, one '98 machine and one 2K machine in production now. Expect that in 15 years will probably only have XP machine left.
8 years later now, and factory now has two Win2K servers and two Win98 machines. Win95 machine upgraded to Win2K svr, 2 DOS machines upgraded to Win98. Four XP machines still in use in test and production equipment.
but I was kind of surprised to see an official Delta airlines computer running XP (had the XP screensaver at least) a couple of weeks ago at the gate I was at. Or maybe it is a generic computer managed by the airport and just used by whatever airline is at the gate I am not sure.
The Checkin, Transfer and Boarding desks are more than likely provided by the Airport. The Staff sign in with their airline ID and get access to the airline DCS (Departure control System) which is where all the passenger details are held. The Airline DCS is an app supplied by the airline to the Airport. For small airlines they may well not have a DCS of their own so they use a generic one supplied by the Airport that allows them to connect to the system that hold all their Passenger details.
There are a few suppliers of these terminal systems. AFAIK, they all migrated to Windows 7 a couple of years ago but and here is the nub.... Airports don't want to upgrade their systems. The 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' mantra rules ok!
On the plus side, these systems are heavily firewalled off from the internet and their local copies of IE won't get access to the WWW (that is true in all the airports i've worked on).
So let's get this straight:
Linux on the desktop = nowhere.
Mac on the desktop = nowhere.
Microsoft on the desktop = still everywhere, just choose your flavour.
How galling for all the little fanbois. Even the reviled Windows 8 market share is orders of magnitude higher than Linux or Mac.
So what? There's an advantage to using something that's not the most popular. It's your loss that you feel the need to use something just because everyone else is. Non-Windows users are evidently not like that.
But anyway, the desktop is losing popularity. Only advanced users will stay on the desktop, and advanced users need something more than what Windows provides.
"Even the reviled Windows 8 market share is orders of magnitude higher than Linux or Mac."
Actually we don't know that. The missing market share (XP's drop minus Win8.1's gain) appears to have ended up classified as "Other". That's probably Android or perhaps "people configuring their browsers not to say". (If the latter, the sudden surge in privacy-conscious users is much to be welcomed. Perhaps the stories around ShellShock and Poodle (or whatever the name is) have reached a wider audience.)
But it could, theoretically, announce the arrival of Linux (or BSD) on the Desktop.
No way did the number shrink by 5% in one month, that would require taking a few million XP machines out of service each day!
I suspect they noticed the widening discrepancy with other measurements, found they had a big problem in their methodology that overestimated XP's share, and corrected it. Fixing it caused a huge drop which of course they aren't commenting on, because it would lead to uncomfortable questions like "how do you know that was the only problem?"
If I'm right, next month it'll resume the steady declines of well under 1% per month.
Thankyou Doug. 16 posts down and someone finally has the sense to spot the obvious.
(Not having a go at you here, not at all, just wondering a bit grumpily why none of the previous 15 contributors bothered to think it through and post such good sense on-topic.)
Of course, it's possible that this is just a one-time methodological glitch and the numbers will return to more typical ones next time, but my money says that it is just as you say it is - they finally found a .major problem and corrected it, carefully not telling anyone about the precious goofs.
XP nevertheless remains very common out there in the real world and there seems to be no particular reason why it won't go on doing useful work for a very long while yet. In my workshop, the pace of XP replacement work has slowed significantly over the last month or two. It's pretty rare now to get a straight XP upgrade job come in. To be sure, we are still replacing XP installs on existing hardware and replacing XP machines with new ones, but mostly now as a byproduct of some other presenting issue (such as a hardware failure or general deterioration) rather than specifically because the customer isn't happy running XP any longer. In short, the ones who haven't already switched look as though they will be running XP until the machine breaks or they can't find space for it in the nursing home.
A simple explanation for this sudden drop in XP combined with a rise in 8.1 is we are seeing the effects of the "Back to school", "uni", etc. system sales. Which would only show in the market share data in the month(s) following these system being used for real, namely after students return to their studies.
Given the nature of market share data, all it is telling us is that people are using non-XP systems more than previously; so we could concluded that students have simply stopped using mum and dad's ancient XP system since they now have a brand new laptop of their own, running 8.1.
This would also cover the projection you are making concerning the on-going decline of XP.
All 'friends and relations' I maintain are using XP (except one Vista accident) and none has plans to upgrade a computer that does everything they want. My experiments with Win10 Tech Preview on an older machine won't even boot from DVD (error 'code 5') - still trying. Linux Mint is a bridge too far for their software collection, so they'll just be on risk with XP until the hardware dies.
if its a service pack then do all Win 8.X go out of support in 2016 or just 8.0.
and if Windows 8 and 8.1 are split why is apple os X .1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9 not split in to separate lines or pie segments depending which graph you look at.
Apple stop support for their OS much quicker than Microsoft, I have a mid 2008 Mac on the last OS the hardware will support as it wont run 64 bit and its not supported any more (since late 3013) so wide open to "shell shocked" at least new MS software will generally run on ancient hardware if you are prepared to wait as the cogs turn slowly. :-(
Microsoft publish a lifecycle for their products i cant find one for Apple you just stop getting updates one day.
I'm Keeping my windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Unless windows 10 is better beyond compare (better security, does not require a Microsoft ID for anything except windows store and NOT for updates, and does not force everything in to the Cloud.)
Windows 7 is the last version of Windows my organization will buy. Except for a few legacy applications which will be replaced before 7 is declared obsolete and Microsoft tries to ram a "new" version down out throats, we have few dependencies on Windows and those that do exist are diminishing at a rapid pace.