Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Execs: what can we do?!
Jim from marketing: We could throw ads into windows 11… That’ll get em flocking! People love ads!
More AI in the start menu!
Execs: Holy shit. Give him a raise.
Lay off everyone else while you’re at it.
Ads will continue till the users fall in love with ads
In my company they legitimately try to convince us that our users love ads.
I conducted user research on one of our websites, which showed complaints about the amount of ad placements we have been throwing at them. The execs responded by telling me “but we are actually HELPING them, we’re showing them products that will improve their productivity and processes”. Then, they came up with ideas for new ways we can place MORE ads on top of the ones already there. I’m sure our users are loving it!
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Good god that’s actually insane. Corpos have completely lost it.
It’s more like the execs know that ad revenue is a significant chunk of the revenue stream and cost very little to implement so they’ll keep growing that until it starts measurably impacting other revenue centers in the org
Sounds like what happened when Windows 8 came out. Oops I meant Windows Vista. My bad, I’m thinking of Windows Me. Sorry, I might have it confused with NT 3. Everyone loved Windows 2.0 right?
Every other version of Windows. It’s practically a law of nature at this point.
Exception: 95 and 98
I agree, but we can’t leave out Windows 7
Seems like they’re on track to break the streak with Windows 12.
XP was terrible until sp2 and in fact so insecure that people all over the world got infected by all kinds of shit.
People forgot or are too young to remember, but XP needed several “service packs” before it was good.
8/8.1 were better than 7/10
Far better. Let the crowd shout. Win 8.1 was the last version enjoyable.
They hated him because he spoke the truth
Regardless of OS, I’d like to see actual user numbers with stats like this because a percentage oversimplifies the landscape.
Have people moved away from (uninstalled) Windows 11 or have people just bought computers with a different OS/older version of Windows on it. To me, these tell a different tale.
Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn’t go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.
Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don’t see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don’t click through:
We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don’t measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.
i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we’ll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It’s the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.
When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the “learn more” websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.
From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.
So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.
Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.
That is very interesting. That’s a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it’s hard to prove.
It’s also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that’s the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it’s also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.
Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I’d be surprised if it was as simple as “people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason”.
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and ‘Windows 11 ready’. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I’m happy. Highly recommended.
I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I’ve become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck’s monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
As someone who uses all 3 (work-issue MBP, personal dev laptop on fedora 40, overbuilt gaming-oriented desktop on w10 with a dual boot Ubuntu partition I haven’t used in ages because WSL lets me do what I need to most of the time), it’s really not that bad. Then again, I’ve had a trifecta like that for well over a decade at this point, so maybe I’ve just fully acclimatized to switching machines and OSes for different primary activities all the time.
That’s it, they need to roll out ads in BIOS
Want to change your boot order?
You’ll need to watch a 30 second ad, or subscribe for ad free BIOS for just 1.99/month
BaaS??! Oh FFS. It’s too real.
Thankfully no results from any actual BaaS companies yet
I work with Windows as a requirement of my job, I’m in IT and I’m constantly in and out of the bowels of the operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on this stuff.
My first thought is, stop moving everything around. Even in Windows 10, if you’re using an older version, say 1804, and you switch to a newer version, say 22H2, stuff is moved all over the place. It makes it super hard to direct someone blindly to the control they need to click to get something done. You’re making my job much harder than it needs to be. Stop it. There’s no reason to move this crap around.
To bring out my grumpy old man routine: back in my day, if you wanted to do anything, you went to the control panel. Everything you needed was there. Now it’s in settings, no wait, clicking on this settings option for that thing now launches an appx thing that, surprisingly (/s) is broken.
Too many damn times have I tried to open their damned settings app or the new defender security appx dialog simply crashes. The solution is almost always dkim online repair. Well, if it needs repair so damn much, how about you just repair it for me as part of system maintenance? The fuck.
Windows 11 is a special form of suffering. Right clicking on a file and… What the fuck is this? I basically click on “more settings” every time I right click. And the changes to the settings application… Don’t get me started.
Also, why in the fuck do we have copilot installed by default now? You’re an operating system, stay in your goddamned lane.
The only good thing I can say about Windows 11 is that it has really good security. So good that I frequently have trouble doing routine things. Today, I was trying to run a PowerShell script and it told me some bullshit error, which is pretty common for PowerShell. After googling the error, the recommendation was to change the execution policy. I went to do that at an administrative PowerShell prompt and it told me that I didn’t have access to change it. While running as the administrator. Yay. Shit is broken again. Fuck me I guess. I’m off to unfuck my less than five month old new work system because Microsoft can’t get their shit straight.
Customization options do not and cannot help me. 90% of the time I’m working on someone else’s computer, so I have to fucking deal with the default behavior because I’m not going to change it for 500+ users whom I support. I’m pretty sure I’d get more than a few complaints. So I have to fucking deal with whatever hairbrained decision Microsoft made about what should be default.
Windows 10 had its own share of bullshit. One of my most common annoyances was the way the OS decided to install fucking candy crush, every fucking time a new user logged into the goddamned computer. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, but not fun and filled with uninstalls. I hope Microsoft made some good money on that brand deal, because I sure paid for it with my frustration.
After all of this, I keep finding myself in the fucking registry, and thank God that’s one thing that hasn’t been fucked over by their new UI team. I keep having to fix dumb issues by injecting registry keys so I can not deal with the stupid UI all the goddamned time. It’s hacky, and I’m happier for it.
I could keep going. Pretty much every decision they’ve made in the past 5 years has been some measure of bad. The only thing I’ve agreed with them doing is finally ending internet explorer. Begrudgingly, edge is better, but not by a lot, IMO.
The last thing I’ll say is that the tpm bullshit is going to give me an aneurysm. Having a TPM at Windows install usually prompts the system to activate bitlocker. Bitlocker itself isn’t bad, but it’s fucking terrible when windows does this shit and doesn’t really inform the user about it. Nobody knows that they need to back up their goddamned bitlocker recovery keys, so inevitably, when something goes wrong (we’re talking about Windows here, something will go wrong) and the system stops booting, you need the fucking bitlocker recovery key to do anything. Your option, if you can call it that, if you can’t get the recovery key, is to format all of your shit, and reinstall from scratch. I know several people who have lost a lot of work and irreplaceable files, like pictures, because bitlocker fucked them over and they had no idea it was even running.
Sorry about your loss, but all those family photos you saved that don’t exist anywhere else are locked behind basically uncrackable encryption, get fucked, I guess.
I’m going to cut this rant off. Needless to say I’m pretty tired of Microsoft’s bullshit. Make an operating system. That’s what people want. That’s it. We shouldn’t need “debloat” scripts to fix your nonsense. Gah.
Idk if you love or hate windows but I hope your job switches to linux for your sanity lol I would be going crazy. Just reading your rant gave me anxiety
I like how the settings for daylight savings just fucking disappeared on my kid’s laptop and I had to edit the registry to get the setting to show up and correct the time.
Oh. I have one for this. I support people from several timezones, so to help myself, I set up a couple of additional clocks in Windows, so I could keep track of what time it is for the user, since most people are bad at thinking outside of their local timezone.
Well, I’m in a timezone that uses DST, and when it started for my timezone this year, all of my clocks changed. Every last one of them are now wrong, since the actual timezones they are for don’t do DST.
Gg windows.
Inb4 microsoft is forced to bring back support for windows 10. Seems nobody believes in innovation anymore since all it means now is AI „helping” you with tasks you could do yourself or ads everywhere you look.
Same shit going on everywhere. I recently fixed my iphone 12 pro because upgrading by three generations literally would get me a usb-c port and an additional fucking button.
I genuinely think Microsoft won’t extend anything for Win10 unfortunately, no matter how many users cling to it. I’d love to be eating my words here, but I think Microsoft would rather pull all the marketing tricks out the book to force everyone into Win11.
I don’t think they’ll extend it, but I’m predicting that there will be some massive bug or security issue found in Windows 10 after its support has ended, and Microsoft will be forced to create an update for it since Windows 10 will retain such high market share.
Not sure why so many companies are so focused on making a miserable user experience these days. I know it’s mainly about appeasing shareholders, but it feels like there should be a few more long-sighted people in the mix who can see this backfire in the end.
Not sure why so many companies are so focused on making a miserable user experience these days.
Being annoying boosts short term sales and that’s all anyone cares about
Windows 10 is pretty crappy but tolerable, everything I’ve seen about 11 suggests it’s a utter shit show.
I really don’t have any issues with it, but I debloated it as soon as I got it.
So you removed all of the windows 11 from the windows 11, sounds pretty tolerable.
Not like Windows 10 doesn’t have heaps and heaps of bloat and spyware. Windows 11 just continues the trend.
How many % of these 70% can’t upgrade to windows 11 due to hardware limitation?
Probably a fair share. The hardware requirements aren’t unreasonably high but a lot of people (like myself) are running hardware that is 10+ years old because why not? Still works fine, if you don’t need that much power.
Not that I’d run Win 11 anyways. Tried it, was a pretty but nonfunctional mess, downgraded to 10 at first and upgraded to Linux later.
It’s so wild how Windows boasts about backwards compatibility but doesn’t support hardware from 2010. It’s literally a fully functional 64 bit system but it doesn’t have SecureBoot so it won’t let me install 11.
That is because they are still required to improve their software, and that means sometimes cutting off a part of their support. Especially when it comes to security.
But hey, support for hardware that is 10 years old is unfortunately still way ahead of the competition, Mac can’t hold a candle.
And you could still bypass the TPM requirement with some elbow grease.
If I bypass the TPM requirement, will it break in the future?
My office is currently forcing us on to Win 11.
Feels bad man.
Hope you enjoy combined tasks in your taskbar…
Does your office have a choice or have they been caught in the permanent obsolescence game? Often one single professional app that provides new versions only for W11 does the trick.
We’re a Microsoft shop, so we’ve been flies caught in the ointment since day one. I wish it was one app. We’re all in - Teams, Office, Visual Studio, Outlook, the works.
I’d say I don’t really understand the rush, but we were supposed to be live with Win11 last year. I guess in this particular case, my office’s dysfunction has worked in my favor.
FIS👏CAL👏CLIFF👏
TBH part of the problem is that Microsoft’s revenue is only 12% from Windows, and I imagine its profit is lower because it involves a lot of maintaining like antivirus and hardware compatibility than some of their other products.
Basically, they can afford to fuck around with Windows OS and still expect to beat quarterly projections (which they did, again.)
Nice picture. Really wild to think that search advertisements (only Bing?) is only 2% under Xbox/gaming related, considering they own so many studios now. Also surprising that the gaming segment is so small
You gotta think that with all of the world’s resource procurement, logistics, manufacturing, distribution, sales, financing, and metrics for every employee and wages, and every outcome compared to every projection, the use of computers is so much bigger than a couple of rich countries with a limited demographic playing video games. If anything, 8% is kind of impressive.
😕
