Tag Archives | Operating Systems

Lies, Damned Lies, and Market-Share Statistics

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 21, 2011 at 9:27 am

The world of technology is rife with horse races–so much so that many tech blogs read like the Daily Racing Form. There’s PC sales vs. Mac sales. iPhone shipments vs. Android shipments. Internet Explorer usage vs. Firefox usage vs. Chrome usage. Everybody loves to keep track of who’s ahead and interpret the significance of any changes. (Including me.) The primary way that tech publications do that is by reporting on market share numbers reported by research firms and other third-party entities.

More and more, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that the good articles about tech market-share data may be outnumbered by ones that are, at best, not very enlightening. Good data gets mangled and misinterpreted; bad data gets treated like good data. Herewith, a few of the reasons why it’s so important to approach these stories with a healthy dose of skepticism.

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Honeycomb Better Be Good

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 13, 2011 at 10:21 am

For this week’s TIME.com column–the first, incidentally, to appear on Thursday, our new publication date–I took a look at the tablet-fest that was this year’s CES. There was so much news about entrants new and old that it was impossible to be comprehensive–I understand one commenter’s frustration that I didn’t mention the Notion Ink Adam–but I still think the big development was the profusion of would-be iPad rivals running Android. In a remarkably short amount of time, we’ve gone from one major Android tablet (Samsung’s Galaxy Tab) to so many that it’s tough to keep track of them all. If all these models show up and aren’t flops, Android is going to be the dominant tablet operating system, at least for a while.

As I say in the TIME column, I think that tablet software is more important than tablet hardware: Most of the devices at CES were remarkably similar in every way except for screen size. Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the first truly tablet-friendly version of the OS, is going to play an enormous role in defining all these new tablets. And we still don’t know that much about it.

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CES 2011: Yup, Microsoft is Bringing Windows to ARM Chips

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 5, 2011 at 2:56 pm

Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote isn’t until 6:30pm PT tonight–I’ll be liveblogging it–but Microsoft already made news today at an afternoon press event by confirming the Wall Street Journal’s report that it’s working on a version of Windows that will run on the ARM chips widely used in phones, tablets, set-top boxes and other computing devices that aren’t PCs, as well as competitive x86 system-on-a-chip designs from Intel and AMD. Windows honcho Steven Sinofksy did some demos of Windows (and Office, and IE) running on test boards powered by these processors, and said that the system requirements of phones and the system requirements of PCs are starting to converge, and that his demos were of “the next generation of Windows,” which he refused to call Windows 8. He also showed a new version of Microsoft’s Surface table build by Samsung and based on all-new technology.

And that’s about all he did–he cheerfully announced that he wasn’t talking about the user interface of the new Windows or when it might ship. More thoughts later…

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The Promise and Pitfalls of Cloud Computing

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 23, 2010 at 9:30 am

Here’s this week’s Technologizer column on TIME.com. It was inspired by spending time with Google’s Cr-48 Chrome notebook:

Even if I have a tough time imagining myself recommending Chrome computers to typical consumers as soon as the first half of 2011, I’m glad that they exist. The very existence of Chrome OS should encourage the development of sophisticated next-generation Web services that are better able to replace traditional software. By 2012 or 2013, pure cloud computing could feel far more tenable than it does right now — and if it does, the experiment known as Cr-48 will deserve some of the credit.

Here’s another update on my attitude towards the Cr-48. I’m out of town for the holidays, and while I took the Cr-48 with me as my only computer on my last trip, I decided to tote my MacBook Air this time. If the Cr-48 could be made to run Photoshop, I might have taken it instead…

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More Fun (and Headaches) With Google’s Cr-48 Chromebook

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 13, 2010 at 5:25 pm

Cr-48 notebookAt the end of last week, I mentioned that I was heading out of town for a long weekend–mostly involving pleasure, but some work as well–and was going to take Google’s Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook as my only computer. The trip’s almost over. And here’s a report on how it went.

  • Like Chrome-the-browser, Chrome OS includes an embedded version of Adobe’s Flash Player. And as with the browser, the fact that Flash is built in doesn’t seem to do much to improve it, at least in my experience. I’ve had repeated instances of Flash crashing, leaving Chrome’s “choking folder” icon where a video should be. In fact, entire tabs have crashed on the Cr-48 several times; I can’t tell whether Flash is the culprit.

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A World Divided…By Symbian

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 30, 2010 at 9:56 pm

While much ado has been made about Android’s rise to prominence, there still remains a large hill for the operating system to climb when it comes to overall usage. When all is said and done, worldwide there are two dominant smartphone operating systems: iOS and Symbian.

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together market share statistics based on Web usage it compiled from  analytics firm StatCounter. What it shows is a world divided–with Symbian nearly surrounded by iOS to the west and east.

Symbian’s biggest market is the African continent, where it holds about 75 percent shre. It is also iOS’ weakest: about 2 percent of Web traffic comes from iPhones. Symbian also holds commanding market share in Asia and South America, with just over 50 percent  share in both cases.

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Chrome OS Update

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 25, 2010 at 8:45 pm

Good story in the New York Times on Google’s Chrome OS, with some juicy tidbits (a Google honcho says that 60 percent of businesses could dump Windows for Chrome OS immediately, and that he “hopes” Chrome OS leads to system administrators losing their jobs.)

I’m looking forward to seeing Chrome OS machines, whenever they show up, but I worry that it’s both outdated (it dates from the pre-iPad era, and feels like it) and ahead of its time (it assumes you don’t want to run any local apps at all). We’ll see.

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The Ones That Didn’t Make It: Windows’ Failed Rivals

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 22, 2010 at 5:37 am

Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0 on November 20th, 1985. Twenty-five years and two days later, it’s not just hard to remember an era in which Windows wasn’t everywhere–it’s also easy to forget that it wasn’t a given that it would catch on, period.

The company had announced the software in November of 1983, before most PC users had ever seen a graphical user interface or touched the input device known as a mouse. But by the time Windows finally shipped two years later, after a series of embarrassing delays, it had seemingly blown whatever first-mover advantage it might have had. At least four other major DOS add-ons that let users run multiple programs in “windows” had already arrived.

In a pattern that Microsoft would repeat with later products, though, it managed to make being late to the party work in its advantage. For one thing, Windows’ super-premature announcement left those four earlier packages competing with it even though it didn’t actually exist yet; many people sensibly postponed buying any “windowing” environment until it was clear how things would pan out.

For another, most of the developers of the earliest Windows rivals shot themselves in the foot, usually more than once: They released products that required cutting-edge machines which few people owned, or got ensnared in lawsuits, or failed to get third-party developers on board. Just as several of them were running out of steam, Windows arrived on the scene. And even though it didn’t gain traction for nearly another half a decade, that was okay; nothing else became a hit in the interim.

“Our approach is that there is only going to be one winner,” InfoWorld quoted Microsoft marketing honcho Steve “Bulmer” as saying in November of 1983, shortly after Windows was announced. The publication got his name wrong, but he couldn’t have been more right about the market.

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