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July 07, 2009

Latest survey numbers bode poorly for Windows 7, Linux

Despite all the Windows 7 hype and fanfare, XP isn't going anywhere anytime soon

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I love surveys. The idea of getting the straight skinny, directly from the masses, always smell of authenticity to me. Forget the Gartner predictions or the Forrester "we sell whitepapers" prognostications. When I want to know what's really going on in the world of IT, I commission a 10,000-user survey to get my answers.

Or at least I would if I had a staff. Or contacts. Or even a mailing list. Fortunately, the good folks over at Tech Republic were nice enough to put together exactly what I was looking for: lots of raw numbers describing IT's real-world adoption plans for various Windows versions. And true to form, the results they got back are once again poised to upset the apple cart.

[ A year after Microsoft killed XP, about half of all monitored new, Vista-equipped business PCs have been "downgraded" to run XP. | See if your PC can run Windows 7 with our free Windows Sentinel tool. ]

For example, despite Microsoft's claims of "success" with Vista in the enterprise, fully 96 percent of the survey's 10,000 respondents claim that their organizations are still running Windows XP as their primary desktop OS. Furthermore, nearly half (49 percent) plan to either stick with XP indefinitely or switch away from Windows altogether -- to Linux, Mac OS X, and so on.

These numbers jibe with the exo.repository data collected from our own community of 17,000 Windows Sentinel, PC Advisor Performance Monitor, and xpnet.com users. Among business customers, as many as 50 percent of registered systems show signs of having been downgraded from Vista to Windows XP. And with more than half (52 percent) of respondents to the Tech Republic survey stating that they will only migrate from XP when they "absolutely have to, no matter how far out into the future that may be," these numbers do not bode well for Vista's successor, Windows 7.

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dtindall 7-Jul-09 11:39am
Those W7 users are not paying for their copy. Curiosity is free, but does not mean they will be paying for the real thing later on. *nix stays free.
slontz 7-Jul-09 11:51am
I have no doubt that Windows 7 faces a tremendously uphill climb for adoption, after the crap-on-a-stick that was Vista. I for one plan to cling to XP until they pry it out of my cold, dead, hands. But the results of this online survey hardly point to "real-world adoption plans". First and foremost is the problem that all online surveys suffer from: self-selection bias. At best, the results can be construed as "what a non-random selection of TechRepublic readers think or say these plans will be". This is nowhere near an adequate enough sampling to give you an accurate picture of the true adoption plans. I would guess the sample skews too techy and I know it skews too much towards "the kind of person who *care* about answering online polls". Neither of those things bode well for the validity of these results. Even if self-selection weren't a problem, where's the kind of demographic data you need to make a meaningful analysis of the raw poll answers? What answers came from IT decision-makers versus developers? Large companies or small? Conservatively run versus leading/bleeding edge? Technology-oriented, or manufacturing, or healthcare, or government agency, etc.? Which answers came from IT groups whose budgets are in question until the 2010 economic picture becomes clearer? There's a lot that can be said about Windows 7 and its adoption in the enterprise and elsewhere; unfortunately, not much can be said for these survey results.
slontz 7-Jul-09 12:07pm

Formatted for easier reading.

I have no doubt that Windows 7 faces a tremendously uphill climb for adoption, after the crap-on-a-stick that was Vista. I for one plan to cling to XP until they pry it out of my cold, dead, hands.

But the results of this online survey hardly point to "real-world adoption plans". First and foremost is the problem that all online surveys suffer from: self-selection bias. At best, the results can be construed as "what a non-random selection of TechRepublic readers think or say these plans will be". This is nowhere near an adequate enough sampling to give you an accurate picture of the true adoption plans. I would guess the sample skews too techy and I know it skews too much towards "the kind of person who *care* about answering online polls". Neither of those things bode well for the validity of these results.

Even if self-selection weren't a problem, where's the kind of demographic data you need to make a meaningful analysis of the raw poll answers? What answers came from IT decision-makers versus developers? Large companies or small? Conservatively run versus leading/bleeding edge? Technology-oriented, or manufacturing, or healthcare, or government agency, etc.? Which answers came from IT groups whose budgets are in question until the 2010 economic picture becomes clearer?

There's a lot that can be said about Windows 7 and its adoption in the enterprise and elsewhere; unfortunately, not much can be said for these survey results.

Carl Street 7-Jul-09 3:16pm
1 reply
And all this time I thought "cold dead Hans" was the main character in a German horror film... :)
Randall C. Kennedy 7-Jul-09 9:28pm
Carl, Actually it's from... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2LG-ASco6o RCK
JamesMartin 9-Jul-09 6:09pm
Stat counter. I would be inclined to take that number rather than the survey. I still question it's accuracy, depending on how a browser is set to respond to get sites to work. That being said, it is interesting that the few percentage points that Linux shares is matched by the new Windows OS. And it bodes well for Microsoft that there are sufficient downloads to educate users on the new OS quirks being introduced. That being said, I'm not impressed. Microsoft is continuing to try to ruin the user experience on light weight hardware with a "starter edition" where you can't even change the wallpaper. It's a simple cosmetic change. Every other OS out there allows you to do that. Even cell phones allow you to change the "wall paper". It's simple Microsoft wants it all, and wants you to pay them and pay them. So if I have to break out of the line and go the other way while the worlds teeming masses follow Microsoft off the cliff, then I will. I hope Linux continues to have a small percentage of users. There is no profit in writing trojans for such a small niche.

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