Windows 7 outgains Windows 8 in market share again, Windows XP still above 27%

I just recently recommended Win7 to my dad over Win8&#x2F;8.1. I tried getting him to switch to Ubuntu but that just wasn&#x27;t going to happen.<p>I&#x27;ve been testing our web apps in Windows 7&#x2F;8 a lot and I can say that getting people to convert to Win8 is going to be a serious uphill battle for Microsoft. The hidden menu, missing start button, and general hodge-podgery of switching between tablet&#x2F;desktop mode had me ripping my hair out in frustration. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to check my wireless network config in Windows 8 before I got trapped in the white settings screen with no way out. Apparently you have to hover to the top right of the screen for a second to bring up that hidden charms menu even from within the settings screen. Why there&#x27;s no visible &quot;close&quot; button, and why [ESC] didn&#x27;t take me out I&#x27;ll never know but it seems like no one even used Win8 before they released it.

I&#x27;ll post this hear because I need to rant.<p>This weekend I put together a PC for a less technical friend of mine. He had bought windows 8.1 online and had it ready for me, downloaded and burned.<p>Hardware build went fine, installed 8.1. The install went great actually. It was much quicker than I thought it would be!<p>...except it was 32bit.<p>&quot;Dang! Must have missed a drop down.&quot;<p>Hours and hours of reinstalling, pouring over every screen, calling tech support, getting transferred around from department to department eventually landing on someone who was able to tell us that the downloader for windows 8.1 will pick, without option, the bit width of the machine you run the downloader on. WHAT?!<p>I had to drive home to my 64 bit win7 install, download, burn, drive back, and reinstall. The engineering in win 8 is great but the UX and product choices surrounding the engineering is a nightmare.<p>tl;dr had to find a windows 7 machine to install windows 8.

I&#x27;ve used Windows 8 for as long as it&#x27;s been out and it&#x27;s my &#x27;get things done&#x27; OS via bootcamp on my MBP.<p>I work at a place stuck on 7 and I want 8. Many little things and a few bigger things are just better in 8. Task manager?! Search?! Snapping the metro apps (music&#x2F;skype&#x2F;etc) into the little slice along the edge of the screen on one of my monitors?<p>I&#x27;ve only used it on desktops and laptops and it&#x27;s better than 7.<p>What I keep seeing is &quot;serious&quot; computer people who aren&#x27;t Windows users, fans, or enthusiasts flailing - much the same way I flail with linux or OSX when doing the 3-5% of tasks that are not well-supported. Finder? F<i>#&amp;$</i>#&amp;$ finder? How do you organize your files on OSX?<p>So I see someone who feels that they should just &quot;get&quot; a new interface because they know how to use a &quot;from-the-corner&quot; menu system, etc. and they don&#x27;t get it (because they didn&#x27;t watch Scott Hanselman&#x27;s Win8 bootstrapping video). So, obviously nobody should be able to get it... psh - LOSER operating system alert!!! Even number FAIL! Check out the penguin tattoo I got. Linux til I die.<p>Here&#x27;s the thing. My kids get it. They aren&#x27;t 10. Their mental plasticity and lack of ego enabled them to be mad functional right quick. They jump in and out of desktop mode without a whine or cry for help.<p>We&#x27;ve got 20+ years of a model of thought around approaching the machine. Someone disrupts the model, and the champions of disruption crowd roll up in a ball?

I think Windows 8.1 is a lot closer to the classic Windows experience than Windows 8 for e.g. If you select the option to boot directly in the Desktop mode.<p>My mother (55) recently switched from XP to Windows 8.1. Except for 1 - 2 days of initial hurdle she didn&#x27;t needed my help at all. She is by no means a computer person ...

It&#x27;s kind of funny that people accept Net Applications&#x27; metrics for operating system market share when we&#x27;re talking about Windows XP&#x2F;7&#x2F;8 without making a peep but refuse to accept the fact that Net Applications also shows that IE is the dominant web browser by a large margin (IE @ 58%, Chrome @ 17.5%, Firefox @ 17.3%, Safari @ 5.7%).

I work for a reasonably large company that is now in the middle of transitioning all its Windows XP PCs to Windows 7. I imagine that it&#x27;s the same for many businesses that support a large population. Windows 8 represents a larger retraining burden and hasn&#x27;t been around long enough for the IT support to be comfortable with it. This report doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all.

Isn&#x27;t there a huge opportunity here for a stable, modern operating system?<p>Or for some system to run complex Windows apps in Linux? (Wine is great but for many apps, such as Adobe Lightroom or Sony Vegas it just dies silently during install.)<p>If there was some container that would let one run complex, modern Windows apps in Linux I&#x27;m sure people would pay for it. I would pay for it.

Windows 8&#x2F;8.1 has additional security against viruses and malware compared with Windows 7 and for this reason alone I would suggest the update to 8.1<p>It use it in a Parallels VM but it takes little time to become adjusted to using 8.1

Microsoft will be relevant again once they&#x27;ve hit rock bottom. Currently they&#x27;re still digging.