Microsoft Claims a Billion Windows Installs by End of 2008

eldavojohn writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed yesterday that there will be a billion machines running Windows within a year. 'The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion. If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept.'"

Quality vs Quantity

They are the McDonald's of software

Re:Ah, don't underestimate MS

What I was talking about though, was that a DC in Windows is device independent. So, in Windows you can have the same set of code for printing as you do for display rendering. I think that's pretty nifty. And, Windows Metafiles too, were interesting. Had Microsoft been smart, they could have built a browser around a WMF hacked up to have hyperlinks. They had all the pieces in place as early as 1992, but, they just didn't see the application.

Re:Ah, don't underestimate MS

Ok, please explain to me, what is wrong with Windows scheduling, timesharing, fault tolerance, response, file system and networking. It seems to provide those very nicely, and any developer can tap into those features as well. Be specific, repeating your statement doesn't make it true.

Re:Ah, don't underestimate MS

There's also a lot of bad stuff in windows, which is what is being dismissed. Meanwhile, you are too quick to dismiss linux:

a) but linux has ssh, which is far easier than having to remote desktop in to do most tasks. Forcing users to run a full GUI to copy a file is terrible design.
b) and windows 95 borrowed heavily from Mac OS and OS/2. Vista is borrowing heavily from OSX and Beryl/Compiz. Not an argument.
c) see b) above.
d) the power of X11 comes from a separation between what is being drawn and the hardware involved; remote X11 connections are just an instance of this. GDI is a different way of abstracting that information. Besides, regular users don't care *how* it's being drawn.
e) From it's inception, directX was considered inferiour to openGL by all of the big gaming houses. DirectX's popularity is a product of marketing. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_ and_Direct3D [wikipedia.org] for some background).
f) it is now 2007, and linux is far ahead of windows in hardware discovery, and with a few exceptions doesn't even require you to install drivers (now where's the win98 driver floppy for my printer?).
g) you haven't used adept or any of the other modern package managers, clearly. I can install thousands of packages with just a few clicks (and then walk away to have a coffee), or a single command line if I prefer. Windows still requires manual downloading, inserting CDs, clicking through msis and installshields, manual dependency resolution, manual package updating... Kubuntu has a "new package notifier" in the system tray that will not only tell me what OS components need updating, but also which games/office suites/perl modules/utilities/etc can be updated, and which still gives me complete control over what I want to install.

Your FUD is several years out of date. Please try a modern linux distro and come back with some valid complaints.

Re:Ah, don't underestimate MS

I'd suggest Tuxpaint to you and your like.

This sort of comment is exactly what he's complaining about, and a very good reason for someone without an extensive *x bacground to avoid desktop Linux. You just undid all the goodwill that the previous, very informative reply might have generated.

He isn't a computing n00b. If he wants something comparable to Photoshop, and similarly easy to use, don't smugly point him to a kids' drawing program. Just because a program is arcane and difficult to use (GIMP, although it's *slowly* getting better) doesn't automatically mean it's more powerful. Likewise, just because a user seeks a usable program doesn't mean that user is stupid or doesn't need serious functionality.

Given that Linux users needing support have no alternative but to turn to the community, it's pretty unhelpful when the community is rude and condescending.

You can't have it both ways. Either 1) you want Linux to stay the domain of a few self-satisfied, smug nerds, and accordingly never become important on the desktop, or 2) you need to realize there will be users who are new to Linux but, somehow, nevertheless manage to be smart and competent people.

Re:Ah, don't underestimate MS

a) Windows XP remote desktop is easier to deal with than X remoting.

I have to respectfully disagree. Not only does remotely using X offer far more flexibility then RDP, I believe it is a better bandwidth user then RDP. It should be noted we shouldn't praise MS for RDP either, their original TS implementation sucked. Citrix licensed their stuff off to MS so MS could make a better product. Look at old TS and compare it with Citrix of that time period, you will see who was the leader.

b) Both KDE and Gnome borrow u/i design heavily from the Windows 95 Start Bar. The concept of COM based shell extensions was looted by KParts.

Ah, but the glory is we are not limited to those two interfaces. WindowMaker, Enlightenment, XFCE, and others offer more ways to use X and in many cases are less overhead then using Gnome or KDE. Not to mention X has allowed you for ages to have multiple desktops, something that was only possible with third party apps for a long time in Windows. You can also heavily customize the UIs to be less Windows like if you want. Besides, isn't the Win 95 Start Bar essentially a rip-off of the Mac Apple?

e) Although I prefer OpenGL for its ease of entry, a lot of big gaming houses seem to prefer DirectX.

Blame MS for this; however, there are plenty of games that will work just fine in Linux. id seems hell bent on continuing to make their games run on Linux. UT2004 worked (and I pray UT3 does as well). Other games using DirectX will work, though some of them can only do so much in Wine and it is somewhat limited to older DX apps. Honestly, if you play that many games you can always dual boot or just stick with Windows. The gaming argument is weak at best.

f) For a long time, Windows lead in hardware discovery. Linux has closed that gap, I think, but in 1995, I was editing config files to get my X to work with my monitor, and Windows would discover both for me automatically.

This is just a poor argument. Tell me how many issues you've had in 2007? I will also say that there is better legacy support in Linux then Windows. I can still find devices that won't install drivers from the base Windows install but can in Linux, even if only well enough for me to get drivers that work well. The gap is practically closed with the largest problem being the quality of some video drivers.

g) It's -STILL- easier to install a new piece of software on Windows. Too easy, the security people will refrain... :-)

Really? Use apt-get or one of the various front-ends available or yum and then tell me this. Both of these do great at handling dependencies and make installations rather painless. Not to mention I do not need to spend hours installing extra software since most of what I need is installed when I install the OS, including IM clients, web browsers (not owned by MS), office applications, etc.

And, in the applications department, there's really no open source offering that comes remotely close to Visual Studio 2005 and C#, SQL Server 2005, and certainly not even Office 2000, let alone newer versions of Office.

Okay. Visual Studio is great if you are building for Windows. How well can you build on other platforms? Not at all. Go figure. KDevelop is actually fairly good and offers most the items that the average developer will probably ever use. Of course, I still prefer writing makefiles and source by hand. I've never been a huge fan of IDEs. As for Office, I must laugh. First, word processing of 2000 compared to either Abiword or OOo is equivalent in all regards. I see no advantage to either, except for the fact that both Abiword and OOo will still be supported long after 2000 is not. I have seen no major issues with Calc compared to Excel and if you are using Access (or Base) for a database, you should really get your head examined. Most database people will tell you that Access is not a good solution for a database and

Re:Moderators!

Under Linux I have to start up an SSH connection to another computer, enable X forwarding,

Uhh.. what? Why did you have to bring SSH tunneling into it. You could say exactly the same about terminal server.

Under X the simplest is to go to the terminal, select the machine you want to log into and log into it. It's 100% transparent and runs at native speed. This has worked perfectly for 20 years plus. Or you can log in locally and multiple machines on the same desktop just by setting an environment variable (or a script which runs by clicking, which is easier) - and they run exactly as if you'd run them on the local machine again at full speed. Windows just can't do anything like this.

That whole paragraph about figuring stuff out and configuring is just FUD - have you ever even *tried* to use X remotely? 'command line to execute whatever gui you're interested in'? WTF?? Your GUI is already running on your local machine.

X works fine over dialup - it is *designed* to work over slow connections... when it was written that was all they had.

What at egregious insult

to McDonalds. When was the last time you had a Big Mac? It may not be the most nutritious thing in the world, but at least it's TASTY. I have eaten many an XP installer CD, and I can assure you it is neither.

Re:Works both ways

Well, I just stuffed an egg McMuffin in my CD drive.

That's not working out so well either.

Idiot. That's a coffee cup holder. No wonder you're having problems.

Something fishy?

How is this possible? Do that many people even have access to a computer?

Re:Something fishy?

i guess they count the illegal copies too .. *smile*

Re:Something fishy?

some people have more than 1 computer

Re:Something fishy?

Does Ballmer count licenses to get a high number, or conduct polls to get a true number?
What do you think? :-)

I think Ballmer counts licenses to get high.

Re:Something fishy?

Also note that he said "running". I highly doubt that claim. :-)

Of course, he could have meant "running" as in "with scissors".

vm's

Yeah, he's probably right... if you include all the vm's we run to sandbox stuff...

J

I suspect the figures

Does that include reinstalls?

The main question

Are they counting pirated copies?

WarezOv Industries Announces Shared Hosting Initia

ST. PETERSBURG - WarezOv Industries announced today a new initiative in partnership with Microsoft that promises to put shared web hosting on every desktop.

"With Microsoft's help, we have brought web hosting services to nearly one billion PCS across the Internet," announced WarezOv CEO dRO0m@t. "Windows allows us the opportunity to bring value-add to the customer."

WarezOv's suite of administration tools allows easy management of all aspects of web hosting, including DNS, mail services and -- most important -- failover. "By tapping into Window's remote API calls, WarezOv's tools can scale web hosting to nearly any degree, and make it easy for the hoster as well," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "This -- and their tool's ease of install -- is what Windows is all about."

Free Software Foundation president and founder Richard M. Stallman was unavailable for comment. "He's talking to Google about building something similar for GNU/Linux," said a source close to Stallman.

Ob

there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles

To do: Insert joke about crashes.

But is Windows is in top 3 OSs even?

I think that the average household has more Unix systems running for them than Windows. For example - I know for sure that my DVD player and my ADSL modem have Linux running in them. My TV, phones, etc - frankly no idea. Maybe some Unix too, maybe something else. But I heard that this thing runs them most: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project [wikipedia.org]

Yeah, desktop is still important but with things like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC [wikipedia.org] gaining momentum I hope Windows will be further sliding into irrelevancy.

How many PCs have 2 Windows licenses?

I'm not talking XP and Vista either.

I'm talking when a company buy a PC and has a corporate version of Windows XP (no activation req'd)
That means MS gets:
-one license for the PC leaving the store/reseller
  and
-one when the company buys a corporate license for that PC.

Therefore MS get a 2-for-1 deal, everytime!

I know I can count for at least 50...

Let me see... I had to reinstall Windows 12 times on my son's computer, 8 times on my Wife's computer, 5 times on my computer at work, 15 times on my dad's computer, and so on....

Yeah, I can see how Microsoft can claim 1 billion installs - let's see them filter it out to "unique computers" and see where that number goes.

Why surprised?

If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept

Not sure why that's so mind-numbing. I personally own more computers than I do cars, and I have my laptop from work. Two out of my three machines are Windows.

I'm sure most of us work in environments where computers outnumber people. And, I'm sure the back-room infrastructure of most IT departments consists of a fair number of machines doing various things. (And, any sufficiently large organization is gonna have at least one IT department/location.) Hell, I bet Microsoft and Google combined have several hundred thousand machines if not more.

Now, I have no idea of how they estimated this 1 billion machines, but I don't find it a surprising number at all -- I bet my office of 50 people has well over 100 computers running Windows, and we're one office in a multi-national corporation.

Cheers

Re:Why surprised?

see http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=C0_7_1 [itfacts.biz]

There are lots of PCs out there. I have seen a few '95 and '98 machines still in use (Horrors!).

The aspect that eludes M$ is that of the existing PCs, very few can run Vista. M$ plans to kill off XP next year for new licences, and upgrades of XP soon. Will the world trash hundreds of millions of working PCs, PIII and later? Why would they? The world will find Linux ready to run on them with modern software. It takes a salesman to announce a problem with the M$ empire is an advantage.

Whether it likes it or not, the world will not trash that many working PCs and M$ will have to supply a product for them or drop out. This is not like the good old days when M$ had to persuade folks to shift from 8MHz CPUs to 400MHz CPUs where they could see a real benefit. Nowadays, 3000 MHz CPUs are idling and they want folks to run dual core models that can do 200 frames per second in high resolution to read text.

They're just counting the WGA nags

What they're counting is the number of times WGA pops up to confirm that your copy of Windows is valid.

It's just retarded how many times that fucking thing pops up.... Microsoft wants to double quadruple check or something....

User: "but you already checked!!!" ....

MS: "yes and we're going to check again, bend over please .... you like using the computer you paid for right? We'll fix you good if you don't comply."

Energy savings

Just think of the energy savings [slashdot.org] if they had made it the black screen of death.

More than Apple? Slashdot article says not yet

From TFA

"The software giant announced it sold 60 million copies of Windows Vista this year, more than the entire installed base of Apple,"

From http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/184 0206 [slashdot.org]

"According to Net Applications, in June Windows Vista accounted for 4.52% of all systems that browsed the Web, up from January's 0.18%. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93% in February, 2.04% in March, 3.02% in April and 3.74% in May. Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22% in January and hit its high point of 6.46% in May, but it slipped back to 6% in June. If Vista's uptake trend continues, it should pass Mac OS X in Web usage share by the end of August."

Are we to believe all these Vista installs are simply not browsing the web?

Lots more running Linux

A few years ago, I saw an IBM analysis that estimated more than 1 billion device are running Linux (mostly cell phones and routers).

It's as if...

It's as if a billion computers all cried out at once in terror and said, "It appears you are being suddenly silenced. Cancel or allow?"

For an estimated total of...

1,000,000,000,000,000 reboots! Is it a zillion after trillions?

Re:How many zeroes is that?

A Microsoft billion. They use a similar system to calculate the amount of time remaining when installing a .msi.

Re:How many zeroes is that?

Give it up. When I was at primary school in England in the mid-70's, the definition of a billion as 10^12 was already obsolete.

When the British government announces that they've spend a billion on this or squandered a billion on that, everybody knows they mean 10^9. It doesn't occur to anybody younger than eighty that they might mean 10^12.

You might have had a point in 1940. Now you're just being an arse. Hang on, is that you dad?