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I have a feeling this is skewed by massive enterprise purchasing of workstations - they will naturally gravitate towards a stable windows version, and tend not

I have a feeling this is skewed by massive enterprise purchasing of workstations - they will naturally gravitate towards a stable windows version, and tend not to get upgraded very often. I'd like to see a chart of desktop computer market share that people purchase for themselves.

hota_mazi 10y ago
Even so, that "massive enterprise purchasing" would be dwarfed by the number of computers bought for personal use.
- kobeya 10y ago
  ... citation required? With windows terminals on every office desk, every point of sale station, every library computer room, etc. I don't think it is inconceivable that "enterprise" purchasing outnumbers personal purchases.
  - jasonlotito 10y ago
    So does the original claim. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
akiselev 10y ago
Depending on the industry, a lot of your tools might not just be Windows only but also tied to an old (and possibly unsupported in the case of XP) version. This is endemic to any industry involving capital equipment like machining centers or biotech lab equipment that have serviceable lifetimes measured in the decades. A decade ago this wasn't really a problem because this equipment was isolated but now with industrial IoT and modern IT networks they're becoming more and more vulnerable. One mom and pop machine shop I ordered from got tired of using USB drives to haul CAD files and machining instructions between systems so they started using Google Apps with Drive as the sharing mechanism. In order to do that, they had to hook up several 10 year old Windows XP machines to the internet and within weeks they got hit by the blaster worm or some other pre-SP1 virus. That cost them weeks of machine time on their older CNCs and hundreds of man hours doing incident reports for their bigger clients like the defense contractors. The situation in the clinical biotech companies I worked at was never that bad because of HIPPA compliance and more focus on networked services like lab databases but still atrocious. So much of our industrial infrastructure is built on a house of cards.
- jkimmel 10y ago
  > The situation in the clinical biotech companies I worked at was never that bad because of HIPPA compliance and more focus on networked services like lab databases but still atrocious. I can attest that academic biotech labs are still pretty atrocious, for the reasons you mention. Windows XP (or super old OS X installs, pre 10.5) are pretty common on non-networked machines that function as appliances. It's not uncommon to hear about a machine controlling a $X00,000 device being compromised by malware that road in on a USB drive, despite the air gapping. Sometimes I feel that it would be better for vendors to use a super minimal Linux distribution for each of these workstations that basically function as an appliance. Not only could the vendor reduce the attack surface for any potential malware exposure, but the one-off nature of the distro and small overall number of workstations would provide a minimal incentive for malware authors to target.
  - bostand 10y ago
    Check out ubuntu Core, one if its main use cases is exactly this.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Now try to get those hardware manufactures to provide anything else other than OCX or DLLs as device APIs.
nhebb 10y ago
I believe the data is global so the numbers are probably skewed by China and other sources as well. FWIW, I sell a few add-ins for Excel, targeted at B2B users. I get roughly 60k uniques/month, and my Windows visitor stats are: 7 - 61% 10 - 28% 8 - 8% XP - 1% Vista - <1%
- altano 10y ago
  "Skewed" is a weird word to use there.
jasonlotito 10y ago
I wonder how many macs that would remove. Most people that use a mac that I know got their mac from work. That they use it for personal stuff doesn't mean it's not a business laptop.
- toomanybeersies 10y ago
  On the contrary, most people I know outside of my immediate work surroundings (which is skewed by working around a lot of startups) bought their own Macbook (or had their parents buy it, as it were). They were very popular among the arts and commerce crowd at university. Macbooks seem to have cornered the 18-25 female demographic for computers.
  - herbst 10y ago
    Maybe in the US. I've seen personal macs mostly on rich kids (ie. Parents paid for it) or graphic designers.
    - toomanybeersies 10y ago
      I'm based in New Zealand, not the US. I see macs more among developers, but that's because I don't tend to hang around privileged rich kids that much these days, since I work for a living. When I was at university though, the vast majority of computer science students were running either Linux or Windows. I think on the balance of it, it was mostly Windows, but the Linux users seemed to get better grades and had a better idea of what they were doing. Macbooks were the computer of choice for the Arts and Commerce faculty students (most of whom, incidentally, did not have jobs).

hota_mazi 10y ago

Even so, that "massive enterprise purchasing" would be dwarfed by the number of computers bought for personal use.

kobeya 10y ago
... citation required? With windows terminals on every office desk, every point of sale station, every library computer room, etc. I don't think it is inconceivable that "enterprise" purchasing outnumbers personal purchases.
- jasonlotito 10y ago
  So does the original claim. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

akiselev 10y ago

Depending on the industry, a lot of your tools might not just be Windows only but also tied to an old (and possibly unsupported in the case of XP) version. This is endemic to any industry involving capital equipment like machining centers or biotech lab equipment that have serviceable lifetimes measured in the decades. A decade ago this wasn't really a problem because this equipment was isolated but now with industrial IoT and modern IT networks they're becoming more and more vulnerable. One mom and pop machine shop I ordered from got tired of using USB drives to haul CAD files and machining instructions between systems so they started using Google Apps with Drive as the sharing mechanism. In order to do that, they had to hook up several 10 year old Windows XP machines to the internet and within weeks they got hit by the blaster worm or some other pre-SP1 virus. That cost them weeks of machine time on their older CNCs and hundreds of man hours doing incident reports for their bigger clients like the defense contractors. The situation in the clinical biotech companies I worked at was never that bad because of HIPPA compliance and more focus on networked services like lab databases but still atrocious. So much of our industrial infrastructure is built on a house of cards.

jkimmel 10y ago
> The situation in the clinical biotech companies I worked at was never that bad because of HIPPA compliance and more focus on networked services like lab databases but still atrocious. I can attest that academic biotech labs are still pretty atrocious, for the reasons you mention. Windows XP (or super old OS X installs, pre 10.5) are pretty common on non-networked machines that function as appliances. It's not uncommon to hear about a machine controlling a $X00,000 device being compromised by malware that road in on a USB drive, despite the air gapping. Sometimes I feel that it would be better for vendors to use a super minimal Linux distribution for each of these workstations that basically function as an appliance. Not only could the vendor reduce the attack surface for any potential malware exposure, but the one-off nature of the distro and small overall number of workstations would provide a minimal incentive for malware authors to target.
- bostand 10y ago
  Check out ubuntu Core, one if its main use cases is exactly this.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Now try to get those hardware manufactures to provide anything else other than OCX or DLLs as device APIs.

nhebb 10y ago

I believe the data is global so the numbers are probably skewed by China and other sources as well. FWIW, I sell a few add-ins for Excel, targeted at B2B users. I get roughly 60k uniques/month, and my Windows visitor stats are: 7 - 61% 10 - 28% 8 - 8% XP - 1% Vista - <1%

altano 10y ago
"Skewed" is a weird word to use there.

jasonlotito 10y ago

I wonder how many macs that would remove. Most people that use a mac that I know got their mac from work. That they use it for personal stuff doesn't mean it's not a business laptop.

toomanybeersies 10y ago
On the contrary, most people I know outside of my immediate work surroundings (which is skewed by working around a lot of startups) bought their own Macbook (or had their parents buy it, as it were). They were very popular among the arts and commerce crowd at university. Macbooks seem to have cornered the 18-25 female demographic for computers.
- herbst 10y ago
  Maybe in the US. I've seen personal macs mostly on rich kids (ie. Parents paid for it) or graphic designers.
  - toomanybeersies 10y ago
    I'm based in New Zealand, not the US. I see macs more among developers, but that's because I don't tend to hang around privileged rich kids that much these days, since I work for a living. When I was at university though, the vast majority of computer science students were running either Linux or Windows. I think on the balance of it, it was mostly Windows, but the Linux users seemed to get better grades and had a better idea of what they were doing. Macbooks were the computer of choice for the Arts and Commerce faculty students (most of whom, incidentally, did not have jobs).