Twayne said:
Anthony Buckland typed:
There is a huge installed base for XP out there and it's reliable and
stable now, just as win 98 was at the end, and 7 will be at its end.
The number of updates for 7 is already a large and totally
unacceptable number, which could/should have been taken care of
before release though! It's ridiculous!
I do agree that a very substantial number of users are still on XP
though, and are likely to stay there as long as possible. My desktop
can run either XP or 7 and came with both sets of OS/Support/Drivers
discs. The only caveat is that you can't get XP with most new
machines anymore and the bleeding edge machines can't run it for lack
of mother board drivers and the like.
The stats page that I gave a link shows the rate of progression. Click
on "Operating Systems" in the left panel and then click on Versions
Trend in the popup menu.
Their current trend stats show the rate of change from June 2010 to
April 2011 as:
Windows XP: -15% (dropped from 62% to 53% marketshare)
Windows 7 : +83% (raised from 14% to 25% marketshare)
Windows XP still has the lion's majority of the marketshare and it isn't
dropping at nearly the same rate as Windows 7 is increasing. Of course,
when starting out at a much lower adoption rate (for Windows 7), it's
easy to double the rate change, like saying you doubled your membership
by adding 1 additional person to your current 1-person membership.
I figure if Microsoft drops their support for updates to Windows XP,
like at the end of the extended support period (sometime in 2014), then
there will be a big change of rate of users dropping Windows XP. There
may come some critical hump in when users start to migrate away from
Windows XP en masse but that hasn't happened yet and I don't see it
happening at much of a rate change for a few more years.
There have been some nice technology advances in both Vista and 7 but
there isn't enough bang-for-the-buck for me to waste my personal
finances to migrate. Hardware advances over the last 6-8 years have
been, to me, a bit disappointing and mostly just incremental. I'm not
sure that whatever comes after Windows 7 will be my next OS unless I
really find some games or apps critical to my personal needs to draw me
to Windows at that time. The more I wait, the more likely I'll be
switching to some *nix variant as my main OS. Of course, if Microsoft
goes the way of Apple in replacing MacOS with OS/X then I might get
drawn back to Windows.
If Linux could ever get its act together I'll go to one of those
flavors but not until; there are still too many apps that don't exist
or the ones that do are junk, hardware drivers are missing, as are
'nix compatible applications I require having. It'd be a huge step
backwards to go to 'nix for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday ...
I've used Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO, Redhat, SuSE, [K]Ubuntu, and
probably other *nix that I don't recall right now so I'm used to setting
up or using non-Windows platforms. Yet there isn't a critical mass for
the apps that I want to personally use.
Yes, the *nix proselytizers will tell you that you can use Gimp in place
of PhotoShop, OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) in place of Word, or "this" in
place of "that" but they neglect the counts available for "this" versus
the counts for "that". I typically find that I have half a dozen (for
rather special but not specially vertical-market apps) to many dozens of
choices for Windows software that will perform the tasks that I need
which let me have a choice to tailor my software suite to my liking. In
*nix, I'm stuck with fewer choices (usually MUCH fewer) as Window-app
alternatives. The rate of change to adopt *nix variants is stagnant.
