Is the Global Representation of Windows an Indicator of its Quality?

[Sayonara]

strange that its the system running on 90% of the worlds computers...

90% of the world's home PCs, I think you probably mean?

 

[edit]

Split from this thread:

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=9547

[d22k]

90% of the world's home PCs, I think you probably mean?

 

exactly, linux is prolific in buisness.

 

and ok, ill give it a go, see what happens

[Callipygous]

90% of the world's home PCs, I think you probably mean?

 

 

no... i mean 90% of the worlds computers. while linux may be very popular for running a server or similar functions, most of the computers people actually USE in business and at home are running one version or another of windows.

 

how many servers are there?

 

 

("computers" may be too broad of a term, technically there is a computer in every microwave... but i think we all know thats not what were talking about)

[Callipygous]

Not so. The bulk of the people in the world seem to prefer a computer operating system that treats them like idiots. In other words, Windows assumes that the user has zero knowledge of computer use, and offers simplicity of use in return for power, security, control, and so on.

 

 

actually i normally hear the complaint the other way around. most people i talk to seem to think mac is way to idiot friendly and thats why they use windows. unless you were talking about linux? which is far less friendly than either of them.

[Cadmus]

actually i normally hear the complaint the other way around. most people i talk to seem to think mac is way to idiot friendly and thats why they use windows. unless you were talking about linux? which is far less friendly than either of them.

I was not referring to Mac, which has a small but loyal market share. Iwas comparing Windows with Unix flavors. I know that you cannot have "heard it the other way around" when Windows is compared with Unix types.

[Cadmus]

no... i mean 90% of the worlds computers. while linux may be very popular for running a server or similar functions' date=' most of the computers people actually USE in business and at home are running one version or another of windows.

 

how many servers are there?

 

 

("computers" may be too broad of a term, technically there is a computer in every microwave... but i think we all know thats not what were talking about)[/quote']Some of us know what we are talking about, buy you still have something to learn it seems. There are a lot of servers in the world, particularly in the world of business, where Windows does not dominate in the mind of anyone but Microsoft.

[Callipygous]

I was not referring to Mac, which has a small but loyal market share. Iwas comparing Windows with Unix flavors. I know that you cannot have "heard it the other way around" when Windows is compared with Unix types.

 

simple misunderstanding... i thought you were referring to mac (which makes up around 5% btw)

[Callipygous]

Some of us know what we are talking about, buy you still have something to learn it seems. There are a lot of servers in the world, particularly in the world of business, where Windows does not dominate in the mind of anyone but Microsoft.

 

*sigh*

 

try to think big picture here, please... "a lot of servers" is basically nothing on any real kind of scale. were talking about billions of systems. yes, there are absolutely places where microsoft does not have a foot hold, i have actually heard that entire countries (germany was it?) are boycotting microsoft in the govt. because of digital rights management issues.

 

but if you look at the numbers, the fact is the vast majority of systems are still running windows.

 

i didnt say microsoft dominates everywhere, just everywhere but about 10%...

 

(i should also probably note that microsoft is losing ground due to many issues, including the fact that almost all viruses are targeted at windows BECAUSE it is on the vast majority of systems, should be fun to see what happens when linux gets big enough that the hackers start attacking it)

[Sayonara]

I'm actually referring to *nix, not just Linux. Let's not forget Sun, BSD and so on either.

 

Unix or legacy systems are the basis of virtually all backbone systems in commerce, business, research, simulation, and communications. Big whoopee if NT happens to be running on the staff's terminals.

 

It would not surprise me if Windows was in the lead, but I seriously doubt it has a 90% market share.

[Callipygous]

I'm actually referring to *nix' date=' not just Linux. Let's not forget Sun, BSD and so on either.

 

Unix or legacy systems are the basis of virtually all backbone systems in commerce, business, research, simulation, and communications. Big whoopee if NT happens to be running on the staff's terminals.

 

It would not surprise me if Windows was in the lead, but I seriously doubt it has a 90% market share.[/quote']

 

 

well... unix is the basis of everything. and i mean EVERYTHING. windows is based on original unix code, as is mac os. but i dont think thats what you meant, you mean those systems are currently running unix as opposed to windows, right?

 

while this may be true, you have to remember scale. every staff desktop vs the core systems? think about it for a minute... every person working at a company besides those working on the server or those actually conducting research and what not are running on windows machines.

 

take my school for example. the server is running some *nix system, im not sure which. but the library is full of windows, as is the computer lab, and the programming class, and 2 or 3 other computer classes, and another room off of the library.... the only non-windows systems besides the server are the imacs that about 1/5 of the teachers use. most companies have a similar setup.

[Sayonara]

well... unix is the basis of everything. and i mean EVERYTHING. windows is based on original unix code, as is mac os. but i dont think thats what you meant, you mean those systems are currently running unix as opposed to windows, right?

Yes, which is why I used the standard *nix. Windows isn't considered to fall into that category, despite its origins.

 

 

while this may be true, you have to remember scale. every staff desktop vs the core systems? think about it for a minute... every person working at a company besides those working on the server or those actually conducting research and what not are running on windows machines.

True, but terminals get "used" for about eight hours a day at most (and the vast majority of them much less than that).

 

It's not helpful to just count licenses sold or unique o/s footprints (and I'd dispute that an internal network of NT clients, for example, count as unique footprints, because they are deployed centrally and user-specific data is not a part of the o/s). The degree to which an o/s is in use can only be realistically represented by uptime and load.

 

 

most companies have a similar setup

I wouldn't be too sure about that if I were you. Data warehousing, industry gateways, forward/store buffers, disaster recovery sites... even the immense rendering clusters used by CGI companies - these all require considerable resources in terms of individual machines. And that's before we've even started on the web (which actually is 70% Unix) the hundreds of thousands of backbone datacenters, and the millions of redundant backup systems and RAID boxes that happily chug away day-in, day-out.

[Callipygous]

True' date=' but terminals get "used" for about eight hours a day at most (and the vast majority of them much less than that).

 

It's not helpful to just count licenses sold or unique o/s footprints (and I'd dispute that an internal network of NT clients, for example, count as unique footprints, because they are deployed centrally and user-specific data is not a part of the o/s). The degree to which an o/s is in use can only be realistically represented by uptime and load.[/quote']

 

maybe, but i didnt say anything about that. i only said the percentage of systems. i dont have any idea what the amount of use each system gets is...

 

as for unix on the net... duh. websites are on servers, servers tend to be nix : P

[Cadmus]

maybe, but i didnt say anything about that. i only said the percentage of systems. i dont have any idea what the amount of use each system gets is...

I personally think that your position, although valiant, is weak. Let's review.

 

strange that its the system running on 90% of the worlds computers...

 

i thought you were referring to mac (which makes up around 5% btw)

 

Let's see. You have 90% of the world's computers running windows, and 5% running Mac. Are you seriously suggesting that no more than 5% of the computers in the world are running Unix, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc? I think that your number of 90% is somewhat high.

[mossoi]

The 90% figure is probably not too far off. I admin a big network - we have 40,000+ Windows workstations and something like 3,000 servers. Even if all the servers were running *nix (which they aren't) it's still less than 10%.

 

I think there's a lack of understanding in this thread of the real world use of computers, especially in corporate environments. The technical performance of computers and servers often doesn't factor very highly in the running costs associated with them.

 

An example: The industry guideline for the number of servers that each network admin can look after and still meet the business targets (uptime, configuration etc.) is 9 for *nix and 30 for Windows. You would need more than thrice the number of admins to run a *nix network than for Windows.

 

These are the figures businesses look at when choosing technology. regardless of whether *nix is better than Windows the cost of Windows is considerably less and so it is the preferred solution in many cases.

 

As for the cost of licensing Windows, this becomes negligible in the grand scheme of things. I don't know the price of an OEM license (50 - 60 quid maybe, within that region anyway). If a company was to switch its workstations over to *nix the cost of retraining all its staff would far, far outweigh the savings in licenses.

 

While *nix may be running the major backbones like it always has its foothold in workstations and computers people actually use directly is very, very low and there's a whole load more workstations than servers out there.

 

Sayo: Do you have access to the stats for this site? It would be interesting to know the ratio of Windows to *nix hits this site gets. There's no point asking because inveriably people aren't going to be honest - bear in mind also that the nature of this site means that it's going to have a higher percentage of Linux users than most other sites.

[1veedo]

I saw statistics for OS use at this guys website once. He wrote a paper in college.

 

According to him, Linux and BSD were the two most commonly used for servers. It was more then half, like around 70% of all servers are not runnign windows or mac. This may be diferent betweeen "coperate network" servers though. I think he meant like game, web, etc servers.

 

I'm goign to find that site again. It's a hard read so I just looked at the tables, which had sources btw. He was arguing that *nix is more popular, though, and for reasons specified in polls.

[1veedo]

Ok, found it. I rememberd this thing called Tonto or something that generated random names.

 

http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

 

It has statistics on usage, uptime, security, etc.

 

NASA, and most of the US governemtn runs on Linux. I think this might just be because Windows has problems handing certain amounts of data. Like on 98, if your had a HD larger then 32G, it wouldnt recognise it.

 

Hm...

 

"As discussed earlier, the City of Largo, Florida supports 900 city employees using GNU/Linux, saving about $1 million a year"

 

And it costs more to run Linux?

 

As an actual user, I can tell you it takes about 2 hours to get it configured, and I expect mroe out of my box then most people. Have a web server, need to configure my firewall for bzfs. Running Samba, which can be a pain. (If I restart Samba, Windows, flipin Windows needs to reboot to use the network share!)

 

After youset up your OS, it requires no maintnence at all. I'd like to difer on using "more employees" to run Linux. Linux is actually easier to run, because w/ windows, there are constant security holes being found that admins have to patch up. Not to mention that Windows sucks so bad, you ened 3rd party software to get read of memory leaks, and oter problems common to Windows like freezes.

http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html#tco

[mossoi]

I'd like to difer on using "more employees" to run Linux.

You're basing that on opinion though. The costing models for running large networks haven't been chucked together. They are based around the customers needs and delivery of a service within certain parameters based on years of data. I'm not sure you can beg to differ with industry standards.

 

The security patches to Windows aren't as constant as you think, more often than not it's just a case of changing firewall settings which is done centrally. Desktop patches are rolled out to all workstations automatically.

 

"As discussed earlier, the City of Largo, Florida supports 900 city employees using GNU/Linux, saving about $1 million a year"

900 employees, hardly a large network. In almost all cases moving users to Linux from Windows will cost magnitudes more in retraining and lost time than any money saved.

 

I'm not trying to say that either OS is better, just that Windows is by far the most common OS.

 

Not to mention that Windows sucks so bad, you ened 3rd party software to get read of memory leaks

That's a pretty weak argument and again is nothing more than opinion.

[Sayonara]

Like I said earlier, it would not surprise me if Windows had the lead in terms of installation numbers.

 

But to blithely claim then that Windows runs "on 90% of computers" in response to "Windows sucks" (with the implication being that it has this market share due to it's level of not-suckingness) is both erroneous and misleading.

 

- It's erroneous because the figures just aren't that high, unless you ignore various technologies for no good reason.

 

- It's misleading because - for the reasons we have just discussed - the number of installations is not related to the capacity, capability or complexity of the operating system.

 

Windows is a triumph of marketing, not technology.

 

 

The 90% figure is probably not too far off. I admin a big network - we have 40,000+ Windows workstations and something like 3,000 servers. Even if all the servers were running *nix (which they aren't) it's still less than 10%.

Are you taking your off-site DR systems into account? What about the computers that are involved in interfacing your network with others? Do you not think that the raw numbers need to be adjusted for uptime and runtime?

 

Unless the original proposal is going to be quietly turned into "Windows runs on 90% of computers of the type that we typically run Windows on", which is retarded, we need to take account of every box with an O/S on it.

 

 

I think there's a lack of understanding in this thread of the real world use of computers, especially in corporate environments. The technical performance of computers and servers often doesn't factor very highly in the running costs associated with them.

I don't think that's really relevant.

 

 

An example: The industry guideline for the number of servers that each network admin can look after and still meet the business targets (uptime, configuration etc.) is 9 for *nix and 30 for Windows. You would need more than thrice the number of admins to run a *nix network than for Windows.

Without knowing how much work the two systems do per box, you can't just compare the number of admins and decide one is better. For instance, those 9 admins on your *nix box could be doing more than three times the total work than the admins looking after the Windows box (or, if you prefer, a third of the work each - it's easier to sit back and look busy when you're admining on *nix).

 

 

These are the figures businesses look at when choosing technology. regardless of whether *nix is better than Windows the cost of Windows is considerably less and so it is the preferred solution in many cases.

So... "Windows is a triumph of marketing, not technology."

 

 

As for the cost of licensing Windows, this becomes negligible in the grand scheme of things. I don't know the price of an OEM license (50 - 60 quid maybe, within that region anyway). If a company was to switch its workstations over to *nix the cost of retraining all its staff would far, far outweigh the savings in licenses.

I think that it is about £60 at the moment, with very attractive bulk volume discounts. I'm not sure what the potential for end user retraining has to do with comparing current figures - it looks to me like you're turning your post into a list of "Windows versus *nix" reasons, which don't have anything to do with the discussion.

 

 

While *nix may be running the major backbones like it always has its foothold in workstations and computers people actually use directly is very, very low and there's a whole load more workstations than servers out there.

Which has already been conceded. However the points were that (i) there very likely aren't so many more than people seem to think (I mean, let's not forget that IT in business has as diverse a set of requirements as anything else - not everyone has millions of Win terminals per server, and many business have exactly the opposite setup), and (ii) raw terminal numbers is a great way of measuring market penetration but not system suitability or capability.

 

 

Sayo: Do you have access to the stats for this site? It would be interesting to know the ratio of Windows to *nix hits this site gets.

I think vB collects those automatically, and there used to be a stats page which included the records. Don't know if it still exists.

They aren't really going to help though, because very few of the non-Windows machines out there are going to be used for web browsing.

[Callipygous]

considering the original statement was "windows sucks" in reference to windows xp, i think it would be perfectly reasonable to consider the systems we normally run windows on, or even just the personal computers, ignoring their server versions.

 

the point of my statement is that the VAST majority of users choose Windows over any other system. and given that PCs FAR outway the number of servers and similar systems, the end result it that the majority of systems are running windows. windows is absolutely a triumph of marketting, try reading up on their story sometime. its nothing but marketting successes. (this part i got from "the barbarians lead by bill gates" a book by a couple of the key people when the company was starting up) whether or not its a triumph of technology also is not something i can compare, since i dont know most of the core level issues (like security holes and what linux does thats so special) however, when 90% of the computer using populations chooses windows you have to assume they arent ALL just sheep following the marketing. some of them have to be knowledgeable users who decided that it was worth their $300 to get windows instead of getting linux for free. it HAS to have something going for it.

 

i honestly believe that my statistic is right even if you consider ALL systems, but i gaurantee its right for PCs.

[mossoi]

I agree with Callipygous here.

 

The point I'm making has nothing to do with which OS is better than the other. I'm merely pointing out that the USAGE figure of 90% Windows is well to be expected.

 

I also don't see why usage time and capacity has anything to do with this. We are talking about the number of computers running an OS not how much computing is done by each OS.

 

Without knowing how much work the two systems do per box, you can't just compare the number of admins and decide one is better. For instance, those 9 admins on your *nix box could be doing more than three times the total work than the admins looking after the Windows box (or, if you prefer, a third of the work each - it's easier to sit back and look busy when you're admining on *nix).

It's not 9 admins per *nix box it's 9 boxes per admin - ie: you need 3 times the number of admins than with Windows servers to meet the same performance targets.

 

I'm citing corporate networks here because the number of PC's they use far outweighs other types of organisations that may have a need for Linux. Which company would introduce Linux as it's standard desktop with the knowledge that 99% of the staff would need to be trained just to write a letter and manage their data?

 

Don't forget most people don't use computers for technical reasons. A room full of journalists isn't interested about the latest capabilities of their PC, they just want to write articles as they always have done.

 

That figure of 3000 does take into account communicating with other networks. Gateways account for a small percentage of the total server needs.

[Cadmus]

the point of my statement is that the VAST majority of users choose Windows over any other system.

I would like to challenge this. I have purchased a large number of computers. All of the computers that I have purchased in built form, other than macs, have come with windows installed. Never once did I ever choose windows as you say, as there has never been an alternative. I usually dump the original OS for my own choice. I contend that the vast majority of users who use windows did not choose it. Windows comes pre-installed.

[Pangloss]

Sure, but there's a reason why it comes pre-installed. Ask a typical consumer what operating system he wants. After you go on to explain what an operating system is, the vast majority of the time he or she will answer "Windows". They want what they happen to already know how to use, and what all their friends have.

 

BTW, I don't like the stiffling of creativity and monopolistic practices any more than you guys do, but we have *all* (yes even those of us involved in the computer sciences) benefitted from Microsoft's successes. Personally I think the key is to continue to do what we've been doing -- keep our minds open, continue to use competitive solutions whenever we can, adopt new technologies that work even if Microsoft hasn't adopted them yet, and push hard for other people to do the same .

 

We very much "have our cake and eat it too" in this business. There's no question things could be better, but clearly the situation could be a lot worse.

[Cadmus]

Sure, but there's a reason why it comes pre-installed. Ask a typical consumer what operating system he wants.

I disagree with this completely. Windows is marketing king, as someone said previously. That is all.

 

In the U.S., it is very difficult to find computers for sale with no operating system. All of them come with an OS, mostly windows. In other countries, such as Canada, it is possible to buy a computer with no OS, and then to install the OS of choice. Here in the U.S., they come with an OS, typically a crappy Windows OS. When I buy a computer, I have to pay for the Windows garbage. Then I can install a better OS, even if it is still Windows.

 

Go to the local computer store and count how many computers are for sale with no OS. Do you really think that there is much choice for people who want to put their own OS on a machine? The reason is that Microsoft is a crafty marketer and is a ruthless company. It is not that the people begged Microsoft to do this for them.

[mossoi]

Of course they have a choice. Take the OS off.

 

More than likely the type of person who's going to be concerned about the OS they are running is going to buy components to build a proper PC rather than a bog standard store bought one. The people who buy off the shelf PC's are generally happy with Windows, if they weren't then Windows wouldn't come pre-installed.

 

Why is it always the assumption that Windows has spread purely because of the marketing efforts of MS. If people wanted PC's without an OS then that's what would be for sale. It's like all products, stores stock what people buy.

[Cadmus]

Of course they have a choice. Take the OS off.

Are you responding to me? They have a choice in what OS they use, but they still have to pay for the original Microsoft OS.