Windows worldwide market share is stuck at 15% and falling

[commodorejohn]

The truth is, most people use their tablet/iPad/smart phone for almost all day to day computing tasks. The desktop is becoming as much a relic as mainframes and minicomputers have now become.

Tablet evangelists keep repeating this mantra, but three years into the iPad era it's still not lining up with any reality I can see. Out of every single person I know, there is exactly one guy who uses a smartphone as his primary computing device, and that by his own admission is because he's out of work and can't afford (his words) "a real computer." He's not even a techie - nor are 90% of the other people I know. They're just normal people. Sure, many of them have iPhones and perhaps tablets, but they use them primarily as mobile browsing/email platforms, they don't try to do serious work on them, and they largely don't even use them when they're not out and about. They have PCs (or Macs) for that. And if they're normal people, what reason do I have to believe that all the other normal people walking around town jabbering into their smartphone don't have a real computer at home?

It's as gertsy says: what's selling is a vastly smaller subset of what people are using.

[commodorejohn]

@commodorejohn I hate to break this to you, but  we don't matter... The people you know are yesterday's users. Spend some  time with young people and see how they are using technology... That's  the future, not those of us who sill remember 8bit games

I use an iPad Mini for 90% of my computing tasks now... With a 5 year  old MacBook Pro for some heavy lifting, content creation work... But  more and more work can be done on mobile devices now!

The people I know encompass an age range from sixty-year-olds (who, we're told, are afraid of the complexity of real computers and are totally all using the iPads now) to elementary-school students. The guy who expressed his desire for "a real computer" is barely out of high school. I know junior-high students who own laptops and use them for mobile computing rather than smartphones or tablets. If these people are "yesterday's users," "today's users" and "tomorrow's users" must all still be in kindergarten.

Seriously, man. If your scaled-down iPad works for you, well, whatever. But your preference has squat to do with what people are actually using, and all the evidence that I have seen points to exactly not what you're claiming.

[commodorejohn]

I'll believe it when I see it.

[commodorejohn]

"Just wait until tablets become shoddy laptops, and then they'll probably get all the software laptops already have!"

[commodorejohn]

Windows 7 is ugly. So is XP's Luna theme, and Vista's weird transitional look. But XP and Vista at least let you go back to the classic Windows 95 look. 7 doesn't, because Microsoft's official New Direction (beginning with many of the other changes in Vista, and now brought to fruition in 8's inescapable Metro Start screen, among other things) is that everybody uses the new things, legacy is out and you're stupid for wanting it, now bow and pay homage, the design department demands your appreciation for their genius! When all along Windows's #1 selling point has been legacy compatibility and "it works exactly like how it used to work." It's no wonder people are increasingly less-impressed with the new versions.

[commodorejohn]

True enough - which is why it was great when they actually allowed people to roll back to the old look if they didn't like the new one...

[commodorejohn]

Yes, they certainly couldn't have reimplemented themes in a non-kludgy way! They had to get rid of user choice!

[commodorejohn]

They did re-implement themes in a non-kludgy way, which is why they removed the old code.

So you can switch it back to the old look and behavior? Because otherwise they're still a mark down from XP (and to a lesser extent Vista) on that point.

[commodorejohn]

I also like the classic Windows 95 look but dont you ever get bored to it? I had been using XP 6 years but finally in this month my work laptop was upgraded to Windows 7. It is quite refreshing to have a new look and it is not that bad. Maybe not the prettiest, drop shadows look odd.

Eh, no. I don't get bored of the Windows 95 look because, in my humble opinion, the purpose of a user interface is to provide information and control to the user and then get the hell out of the way. Most "pretty" interfaces are really bad at that last part. 7's look isn't remotely the worst I've seen (that title would have to go to all that horrible pointlessly-skeumorphic software that flooded the market in the late '90s-early '00s,) but it wastes a lot of screen space (and some of us are still on 1024x768, mind!) and has a lot of visual "noise" that catches the eye to no other purpose than looking pretty. The 95 look delivers information in a neat, clean way that never distracts you from what you're actually doing, and that's what a UI should be.

[commodorejohn]

Enough disk space there, som99?

[commodorejohn]

No you can't, which is good because it means that old look that 0.1% of people would use isn't in there slowing the computer and the Microsoft developers down.
 
That puts them several marks up.

If they already have the capability in the OS, then providing the old look and feel as an option is not going to slow the system down. You're talking nonsense to justify their behavior.
 
Also, your "0.1%" is pulled out of thin air. Fact is, a year on from release, Windows 8 has only just cracked 8% market share - slightly over one-sixth of 7's and just over one-fourth of XP's. So the newer OS that acts closer to the old OS is six times as successful as the one that doesn't, and the old OS is still four times more popular than the new hotness. Those are't numbers that suggest that "0.1%" of people care about this.

I know you can't help being cranky, but it's not all about you.

And it's not about anybody else who just wants to use their computer the way they've always used their computer, either. Which is the reason behind those numbers up there. Microsoft has spent the last two years banging their head against the wall, failing to understand or accept that they can't just engineer their customers to fit the product they want to make - with Windows 8, with the Surface, with the XBone - and they're alienating the customers they do have in the process. That's really stupid behavior for a business.

[commodorejohn]

How about if you quote the stats like this; Add  Mobile phone and PDA units to the first percentage and it no longer  looks drastic at all. Microsoft never played in that arena at all and  only started last year, so I don't know what you mean by head start.

That's not true. Microsoft has been trying to get in on the mobile trend since the days of Pocket PCs. They had some success with Windows CE back then, because there was little else available other than Palm and Blackberry, but they've been trying and failing to catch up to the iPhone for six years now.

I refer back to my previous comment; I imagine in the 70's, mainframe users would have looked down on Microcomputers as "silly toys"... Now they have all but replaced mainframes.

The difference is that microcomputers used the exact same physical UI for the end user as mainframes/minicomputers - first a keyboard and text display, and then a graphical display and mouse as well. Microcomputer manufacturers didn't invent some gimmicky new interface when the one that was already the standard was entirely adequate, so once the hardware caught up, there was basically no reason not to just use micros. If microcomputer manufacturers had gotten it into their head that they should fundamentally alter the way the user interacted with the computer, it would've been a different story.

[commodorejohn]

And don't forget punched cards and paper tapes!

Those were storage media - how people loaded things into the computer, not how they interacted with it. (Well, not by the time micros came around, anyway - the days of the "priesthood" feeding the mundane user/programmers' punch cards, made with a keypunch, into the machine and returning the results on more punch cards had already given way to the users directly interacting with the mainframe via terminals.)

[commodorejohn]

I like the Firefox browser but the versions in the last few years have been slower and buggy.

Firefox has been getting progressively worse since they started the version-of-the-month club...wish they'd go back to actually taking the time to get something ready for release before releasing it...