Vista, IE Struggle with Market Share
Your non-news news of the week is that people still don't like Vista. Specifically,
some research group called Janco -- we've never heard of it, so get that grain
of salt ready -- says that Vista still has a market share of
less
than 15 percent after almost two years of availability.
Not quite 15 percent? That actually sounds a bit high to us, but we got to
wondering...where was XP at about the same point in its lifespan? Well, after
a very quick Google search (no, we're not even going to pretend that we use
Live Search, or whatever it's called), we found a vague, six-year-old
reference on a message board to a long-departed article, which apparently
stated that XP had gained 20 percent market share in less than a year.
What really strikes us, though, is the tone of the posts on the vintage message
board. Sure, there are complaints about XP there -- specifically about how it
"phones home" -- but, at least in this particular board's little corner
of the Web back in 2002, there wasn't the poison attitude toward the OS that
we see so often with Vista today. (And, yes, we also love the reference at the
bottom of the page to the $45 copy of Windows 98.)
Still, some of the stuff sounds familiar -- folks talking about waiting for
service packs before installing XP or being "sick" of hearing about
the then-new OS. Microsoft is pushing Vista hard again, trying to shake the
notion that it's a failed product. It's certainly not picking up much momentum,
though, and it has had plenty of time to get rolling. We do kind of wonder how
folks plan to move from XP straight to the post-Vista version of Windows (effectively
making XP their OS for nearly a decade), but at this point we're sure that a
lot of people are going to try to do just that.
On another note, Firefox -- according to these Janco people, anyway -- is eating
away at Internet Explorer's market share rather quickly. Apparently IE is down
to just less than 60 percent market share, whereas it had 80-plus percent three
years ago. And Firefox is roaring with almost 20 percent. What really surprises
us, though, is Netscape(!) clocking in with a seemingly impossible 11 percent
market share.
What? Netscape, at 11 percent? Are there that many people still living in 1997?
Maybe so. After all, those of us who still use XP are living in 2002 -- and
we like it there.
Will you stretch XP out until the next version of Windows arrives? If so, how?
Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on August 12, 2008