8 ms·

Windows XP gains in January but so does Windows 8.1

• 300bps 13y ago
  To me, the real interesting part of this story is that Mac OS X trails Windows Vista in market share.
  • ChuckMcM 13y ago
    I took a picture on the train the other day, in the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley on CalTrain it was macbooks all the way down the car. It was the first time I had seen the entire car with nothing but Macbooks. That said, the particular infographic is misleading in a number of ways, MacOS 10.9 but none of the other versions? Windows 8 and 8.1 are differentiated by not Windows Vista, SP1, and SP2? Microsoft's biggest problem is that XP is "good enough" on hardware that will never run Windows 7. That leaves them asking someone to spend anywhere from $500 to $1000 to "upgrade" a machine that is working fine for the intended purpose, sometimes several thousand machines. And who wants to do that? If someone wants to do something crazy at Microsoft it would be to target windows 9 to every single windows capable platform from XP to present. That would be a huge amount of work and so I doubt they will even attempt it, and they would have to back port drivers for hardware where the vendor no longer exists. But it would solidify their OS position once again.
    • Einstalbert 13y ago
      That would make Windows 9 so much money. Having to shell out a huge amount of money for upgrading is keeping our customer base (school districts) from making the leap before the last possible moment. With the advent of thin clients and visualization, having a low-powered machine with a low-overhead operating system is looking more and more normal.
      • ChuckMcM 13y ago
        Well one could argue that folks already paid it forward. One could decide to take a couple of billion out of the cash on hand pile and invest it in reinforcing the OS footprint. I think ultimately that is what Apple is trying to prevent with their low cost OS upgrades. But as a strategic move it would fix a number of weaknesses in Microsoft's current situation.
    • Encosia 13y ago
      That echo chamber is particularly strong though. Here in Atlanta, I usually don't see a single MacBook when I go to Starbucks to work in the afternoon. Lots of iPhones and iPads as auxiliary devices, but almost entirely PCs getting work and study done across every demographic.
      • code_duck 13y ago
        I wonder how that varies regionally. I spent a couple of years traveling and working at coffee shops, and my observation is that most places, similar to where I live in Minnesota, have a high degree of MacBook usage in coffee shops. When I go out here, it's usually about 80% macs. A website I've run for several years is now visited by 30% Mac OS, growing from 18% in 2008.
        • Encosia 13y ago
          When it comes to website traffic, it definitely depends on your audience. I have a consumer-facing website that serves a few million pageviews per month and has never cracked 5% OS X visitors (3.6% last month). On the other hand, my blog sees nearly 10% OS X traffic even though it has a lot of content targeted toward Microsoft developers.
        • hrktb 13y ago
          The battery life of the Macbooks may skew the number of machines seen in open public spaces. I see a lot of coworkers with windows notebooks lugging their power cable everywhere they go and getting the computer out only if they secure a power outlet.
          • Encosia 13y ago
            I recently moved from a MacBook Air (running OS X, not Windows) to a Samsung Ultrabook and haven't seen any noticeable difference in battery life pro or con. That's with it driving a 3200x1800 display and a Core i7 processor too. There are definitely $400 PC laptops out there that just suck from start to finish (including battery life), but good Wintel laptops are pretty easy to find these days.
    • Aaronontheweb 13y ago
      Ex-Microsoftie here. They actually already did that with Windows 8. Steven Sinofsky even did a demo to us where he got Windows 8 up and running on an ancient laptop originally manufactured for use with Windows 95 or 98 (piece of x86 hardware that was close to 20 years old.) Windows 8 has lower system requirements and a smaller storage requirement than Windows 7 - this was necessitated by the requirement to support ARM architecture beginning with Windows 8. The problem is that Windows XP exists predominantly in two environments that are historically tricky for Microsoft: 1. Pirated copies, largely in Asia and 2. Deeply barnacled enterprise deployments, especially in Governments. The reason why Microsoft's bothered supporting XP for so long is because of the amount of revenue tied up in #2. If Microsoft dynamites support for XP and those barnacled enterprises have to reinvent their entire IT infrastructure around something new, there's a very strong possibility in some cases that a Linux-based solution might win, particularly in the public sector. So it's a tricky issue, but Microsoft won't ultimately be able to kick the can down the road forever. What will ultimately move people off of XP is when third party developers decide to stop supporting it, which they largely still do.
      • ChuckMcM 13y ago
        Fascinating, and thanks for that factoid. I wonder why Microsoft has never really pushed that concept out to consumers.
        • Aaronontheweb 13y ago
          I've often wondered that myself - to be honest, I can't recall Microsoft making a strong push for upgrading the OS of existing machines since Windows Vista; primarily, I think, because of the huge disaster that ensued with aforementioned push. The "Upgrade from XP to Vista" rollout backfired for a ton of reasons, but if I had to summarize it was due to these facts: 1. Microsoft did not work closely enough with device manufacturers to ensure device compatibility from Windows XP to Vista. Printers and video cards primarily. 2. Consumers now had to choose between 6 versions of Vista instead of "Pro" or "Home", which was confusing. 3. x64 architecture was introduced, which doubled the number of possible choices consumers had to make and inevitably lead to some consumers being very disappointed with their purchase. 4. Due to the introduction of Aero and some poor quality control on the part of the Windows team, Vista required vastly more resources than what many Windows XP machines were capable of delivering. Vista's minimum install footprint is something monstrous like 16-24GB, which was a stretch for Windows XP machines manufactured as long as 6 years prior. Since then, each version of Windows has required less resources than the edition before it. Sinofsky emphasized that. So in short, I think Microsoft realized that the QA burden is a lot greater than they previously thought and have left it up to their most technical consumers to decide whether or not to upgrade, relying instead on hardware refresh cycles to do most of the heavy lifting for the bulk of their consumers. Unfortunately with the advent of the "multi-device consumer," those upgrade cycles can often be much longer than three years now. Despite those concerns, Microsoft sold copies of Windows 8 for something phenomenally cheap initially, $49 IIRC, in hopes of getting people to upgrade their existing hardware. I believe they discontinued that practice 6 months after the initial release of Windows 8.
    • JumpCrisscross 13y ago
      >in the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley on CalTrain it was macbooks all the way down the car. It was the first time I had seen the entire car with nothing but Macbooks. I notice this in the front cabins of flights nationwide, as well as on the Acela. I think it is less a phenomenon of Silicon Valley than that of crystallising class boundaries.
    • FollowSteph3 13y ago
      That's what Apple does every 3-4 years but with much more expensive hardware. Any Mac computer will not be supported within 3-4 years. Why does Microsoft get in trouble for only supporting 10+ years for the same system...
      • josteink 13y ago
        Not to mention Apple gets away with doing this to $1000+ hardware which then is non-reusable, while Microsoft gets neck deep in shit for not supporting a $100 OS license 15 years down the road when the HW is perfectly reusable with a much cheaper OS update. This is clearly insane.
  • nknighthb 13y ago
    Look at the actual data[1]. Just adding in 10.8 would bring the OS X number to 4.68%, well above Vista. If you add them all, it's 7.68%. [1] http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0 http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....
• dmfdmf 13y ago
  I have a lot of clients still running XP. I have warned them that once MS stops the updates, the bad guys can examine updates for Vista or Win7 and see if the security hole exists in XP. I am guessing that with an April cutoff XP will be unusable as an internet connected device by October.
  • xpextend 13y ago
    Good thing XpExtend was just released at XpExtend[dot]com.
    • ForHackernews 13y ago
      Spam.
    • yuhong 13y ago
      Tip: HN has an about box that you can put things like this in.
  • copx 13y ago
    I know very little about this type of security, how can one remotely hack into a computer just because it is connected to the internet and has some known vulnerability? I mean as far as I know my computer does not execute arbitrary code someone sends it through the internet without asking. So how do you exploit those vulnerabilities? I understand how you can exploit a vulnerability in a browser, those things actually execute whatever code happens to be on the pages you visit, they load images etc. by default. But just Windows XP with an open internet connection... how does code execution happen there?
    • mitchty 13y ago
      Imagine a problem in tcp packet handling that happens due to a problem parsing a tcp packet and further on up the chain the affected service has a buffer overflow in how it reads the data contained in the tcp packet(s) allowing you to inject arbitrary code into that service, lets say the service is RDP or whatever. Then just by having a system being online and able to accept malicious packets to this service, you can with say shodan scan for that vulnerable port across the entire internet, see if the ip is running xp via tcp fingerprinting, then send your malformed packets to the system and add your shiny new xp machine to your botnet for whatever nefarious purposes you need. Also probably patching the hole you used to get in so that nobody else can use it for their purposes. Now this is highly high level and remote vulnerabilities like these are much rarer than browser vulnerabilities, but from what I've heard there are a number of these vulnerabilities floating around just waiting for microsoft to abandon support for xp. Once that happens we might see more xp botnet nodes showing up and causing havoc.
• neonscribe 13y ago
  So almost one-third of Windows machines are about to be unsupported. That sounds scary, but what percentage of those XP systems are anywhere near current with updates anyway?
  • xpextend 13y ago
    Over half the people we've had sign up are not current on XP updates.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • cvbu 13y ago
    Windows XP updates are not very important. Just use a firewall, and antivirus, and don't use IE, and disable autorun. Then out-of-box XP SP3 runs just fine and is secure. I always turn off autoupdates because: 1. Update-on-shutdown sometimes hangs and corrupts system. 2. They interfere with Anti-WPA. (remotely disabling Windows) Updates might matter at multi-user installations or when there is no firewall.
    • laumars 13y ago
      That's terrible advice in my opinion. Non-IE browsers still have vulnerabilities. And that's without taking exploits in third party plugins into account (Flash and Java being two popular vectors for attack) Most antivirus solutions are notoriously bad at new threats and while firewalls might highlight malware trying to phone home, by that point you're already infected. Security is only as strong as your weakest link and thus OS security updates are as vital as updates on any other part of the software stack. And don't think common sense will save you as ad banners are sometimes known to be boobytrapped; legitimate sites get hacked to serve malware too.
    • username42 13y ago
      Don't use IE and "never install microsoft office"
• userbinator 13y ago
  So Vista and 7 users are moving to XP and 8.1? That's weird...
• Theodores 13y ago
  This reminds me of election polls in the UK. Before an election some agency will phone up a thousand or so people and ask them what they plan to do on election day - tick the red box or the blue box. Sometimes they also go door to door or ask people in shopping centres. Despite their methods they do get to miss a lot of folk - those that do not have phones and those that are out working rather than waiting for the pollster to ring their doorbell. Consequently the results are not necessarily representative of true voter intentions. As for the total XP installed count, what about all those machines that get used every day in some workplace for something as ordinary as printing labels but never get to go online? Or those rooms full of PCs that only get occasional use because people bring their own device or do their personal surfing on a phone? Or those PC's in back rooms that generally collect dust? These machines are like the voters the pollsters miss.
• CWIZO 13y ago
  Does anyone know what banks, governments etc will do once XP doesn't have support anymore? I had a discussion with a coworker a couple of times now, and he said a big company can always just pay Microsoft money to support them onwards. Any truth in this?
  • yuhong 13y ago
    I think it is called "custom support" and it is very expensive (at least $500k I think).
  • omh 13y ago
    It is possible to continue to pay for support,but I'm not sure whether this is guaranteed to include security patches. Those large organisations who care about security but are forced to keep XP for some reason will presumably rely on some solid firewalling. If I had an XP box on a dedicated network without internet access then I wouldn't be too concerned in the short term.
  • drewcrawford 13y ago
    I had a discussion with somebody who knows about XP Embedded, which is apparently a lot scarier than regular XP. For one thing it's used in a lot of applications where credit card readers are attached, and for another thing the system requirements went from 128MB to 1GB between XP and 8 which makes upgrading really unattractive. The path of least resistance for the people I talked to seems to be moving to embedded Linux or a Android and rewriting all the software. But they weren't terribly happy about it.
  • csmithuk 13y ago
    Yes. Not much. Dangerous ports are already turned off with group policy (USB, removable media etc), BIOSes are locked down, hardware is still available that will support XP, the networks aren't directly connected to the Internet so they will either be airgapped or have massive edge content filters and firewalls. There aren't many infection vectors for nasties. In fact most of the machines probably don't even have latest updates on them already. Possible not even SP2. Microsoft probably won't be paid other than through their select agreements which allow XP use indefinitely. 3rd party consultants will swarm to help any issues for a fee which is still cheaper than upgrading. The world will still spin and lots of "meh" will be chanted as Windows 7 boxes slowly trickle into production with an old ancient IE9 build on them as and when they feel like it... This really isn't a big issue for companies and governments despite technology news panic stations and sensationalism. To be fair, I consider that I'll be using Windows 7 until possibly after EOL as it does what I need. I'm sitting on a second hand 2008 circa Lenovo T400 and have a spare one in the cupboard. It'll do me fine until 2020 - progress hasn't exactly been rapid in IT in the 6 years.
• laumars 13y ago
  Does anyone know how these figures are collated as Windows sales might include PCs running Linux, some people build machines and then pirate Windows and web site statistics are open to a whole slew of problems from selection bias through to easy OS spoofing. I've not heard of an accurate way to produce these statistics yet cnet are displaying floating points as their percentages and publishing them as fact. So I'd hope they have a reasonably accurate method of collation which I'm unaware of.
  • frobozz 13y ago
    The netmarketshare link in the article states > This report lists the market share of the top operating systems in use for browsing (not servers). This data is derived by aggregating the traffic across our network of websites that use our service. Which isn't all that helpful, as it doesn't say what the network of websites consists of. I would imagine that, with the approaching death of XP, many organisations still stuck on XP are shifting from desktop apps to browser-based apps wherever possible, in order to smooth the transition. This would lead to a rise in traffic from XP machines to SAAS sites.
  • username42 13y ago
    In France, most of the PC have a Windows license sticker even if there are running linux. I think the statistics are biased by the fact that it is difficult to buy a PC without a windows license. Among the last 3 computers I have bought, none are running windows, but 2 have the license.