Microsoft’s Windows XP lost an unprecedented amount of online usage share last month, a Web metrics company stated.

The aging operating system — it turned 10 several weeks ago — lost almost 2 percentage points during September to end the month with a 50.5% share of all desktop operating systems, according to analytics firm Net Applications. The drop was the largest one-month decline in the company’s tracking of Windows XP.

September’s decline represented a 3.9% drop in XP’s share, also a record in Net Applications’ data.

That’s good news for Microsoft, which has been aggressively urging users still running XP to upgrade to Windows 7. “It’s now time for it to go,” said Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, referring to XP during a call with financial analysts last month.

At the same time XP’s share slipped, Windows 7 gained 1.8 percentage points to end September with 32.4%, a record for the 2009 operating system.

Windows 7 has gained 14.8 points in the last 12 months, nearly doubling its share.

During the same period, Windows Vista — the problem- and perception-plagued upgrade that was meant to move users off of XP — declined by 4.7 points. It now accounts for just 9.1% of all operating systems that power personal computers that connect to the Internet.

The combination of Windows XP’s decay and Windows 7′s surge puts the two operating systems on a collision path, with projections showing that the latter will pass the former in the first half of next year, perhaps as early as May.

If XP and Windows 7 behave according to their three-month average, Windows 7 will replace XP as Microsoft’s No. 1 operating system in May 2012; using a 12-month average pushes the swap to June.

Depending on when Microsoft launches Windows 8, the hard-charging Windows 7 may come close to the 50% mark, according to Net Applications’ numbers: Windows 7 should have a 48% share in October 2012, for example.

In the past, new editions of Windows have stolen share from their immediate predecessors, putting a quick end to the any gains by the latter.

Microsoft has not revealed a release schedule for Windows 8, but most analysts assume that the company will replicate the timetable of Windows 7, which went on sale in October 2009.

Net Applications’ operating system data also noted that Mac OS X boosted its share by four-tenths of a percentage point to 6.5%, both records.

Net Applications calculates operating system usage share with data obtained from more than 160 million unique visitors who browse 40,000 Web sites that the company monitors for clients. More OS statistics can be found on the company’s site.

Microsoft has given us a first taste of Windows 8. Unfortunately, while it has some attractive visual elements, Microsoft’s approach shows that the company hasn’t learned much from its product failures over the past decade.

My first impression is that there are two big problems with what Microsoft is doing in Windows 8, but there’s also one change where the old software behemoth is on the right track. Take a look at Microsoft’s first five-minute demo video of Windows 8 and then read my analysis below.

The Windows 8 demo

The video below was released on Wednesday evening to coincide with Windows President Steven Sinofsky offering the first public demo of Windows 8 at the All Things Digital conference (a.k.a. D9). In this video, Jensen Harris, director of program management for the Windows User Experience, provides a quick walk-through and promises that more video demos will be coming soon.

One thing right

Alright, first for the positive. Microsoft is finally getting serious about multitouch, which users love for its simplicity. The new UI that it showed off at D9 and in the Web video obviously draws a lot of influence from Microsoft’s recent work on Zune and Windows Phone 7. Although Microsoft says this new Windows 8 UI will be used for desktops, laptops, and tablets, the demo is on a 10-inch tablet and it’s pretty clear that this is Microsoft’s answer to the iPad, which has been doggedly eating into the sales of Windows PCs. The UI looks clean and self-evident, and it introduces some nice UI innovations for multitasking that a lot of tablet users will appreciate.

Microsoft has been doing touch interfaces for a long time. The original Windows CE (a.k.a. Windows Mobile) had basic touch. Microsoft Surface has sported advanced multitouch gestures and a multitouch UX. But, Microsoft has allowed Apple, Google, HTC, Samsung, and others to outflank them in winning over the masses to multitouch devices.

Think about this. At the D5 conference four years ago when Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs shared the stage, both of them had forthcoming multitouch products to boast about. Jobs had the iPhone and Gates had Microsoft Surface — and, at the time, the tech community was excited about both. The iPhone has sold over 90 million units since then, and spun off massive sales of the iPod Touch and the iPad as well. The Microsoft Surface is now available in a dozen bars in Las Vegas.

Two things wrong

There are two big issues with what Microsoft is trying to do in Windows 8, although they both boil down to the fact that the company is still trying to be all things to all people, and as a result it’s unlikely to make any of its customers fully happy.

First, let’s talk about Microsoft’s shotgun approach to product development in Windows 8. On Wednesday, Windows president Steven Sinofsky said, ”It’s ‘no compromise’ and that’s really important to us.”

When I hear “no compromise,” it usually means “no discipline.” Microsoft has always been afraid to offend any of its potential customers, so it typically piles tons of features on top of the existing codebase and ends up with a Frankenstein monster like Microsoft Office.

When I first heard about Microsoft’s Windows 8 plans on Wednesday night, I posted on Twitter that my translation of “no compromise” was a lack of discipline. I got several great responses from tech professionals who agreed, but the best was from @dgackey, who wrote, “When you say ‘no’ to nothing, it usually means you know nothing about your market.”

What Sinofsky is referring to when he says “no compromise” is that tablets running Windows 8 will run tablet apps, HTML5 apps, and traditional Windows apps, and that Windows 8 itself will run on both traditional PCs as well as tablets.

I would have thought Microsoft learned its lesson here. It has already tried to take the full version of Windows 7 and run it on tablets. These “slates” — as Microsoft calls tablets — have gotten trounced by the iPad. Now, Microsoft has decided to take the full version of Windows and make sweeping UI changes so that it’s much more tablet-friendly and then apply all of those changes to the standard desktop/laptop version of Windows as well. Say what?

That leads me to the second big issue with Windows 8 — it just might ruin the core Windows product that powers most of today’s laptops and desktops. A touch-based UI focuses on large icons and images and imprecise actions (to accomodate different sized fingers). Meanwhile, a traditional UI for a standard mouse and keyboard has much smaller, more complex, and more precise actions and navigational elements. By forcing the tablet-focused Windows 8 UI on traditional Windows, Microsoft could end up removing much of the power and precision that most users rely on to do their daily work.

Microsoft would be much better off just creating a tablet OS, while continuing to tweak and innovate its desktop/laptop OS for users who demand the power, precision, and versatility they get from it. Sure, there will be a lot of users who only need a tablet, and there will be plenty of users who will want a tablet as their secondary computing device. But, declawing the standard version of Windows in order to better compete with the iPad is not the right answer.

Guest Post By Jason Hiner of Tech Republic

Last week at All Things Digital’s D9 conference in California, Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Division president Steve Sinofsky introduced the next version of the Windows OS to the world. And what a coming-out party it was. The guest of honor was all dressed up in a brand new Metro-style GUI, putting to shame all those reports earlier this year (based on leaked screenshots of early builds) that this would be only a “minor update” of Windows 7.

Since that presentation, there have been countless analyses of what we saw, ranging from straight “just the facts” reporting to some pretty wild speculation, peppered with lots of opinions. One thing we know: Microsoft got everybody talking about Windows again, and for a company that many pundits had begun to label irrelevant, that’s a good thing.

An OS by any other name …

Prior to this official unveiling, Microsoft has tried to keep a tight lid on all the details of the Windows release that Steve Ballmer called Microsoft’s “riskiest product bet.” Those within the company weren’t even calling it Windows 8, despite the widespread use of that moniker in the tech press.

In fact, it was interesting to me that Sinofsky, when pressed by Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg at D9, said “we’re just going to call it a code name”- although when Steve Ballmer called it Windows 8 at a developer’s conference in Japan last month, that prompted many reports that the name had been confirmed. Sinofsky has previously referred to it as “the Next Windows” or “Windows vNext.” During the demo, he called it “this build of Windows.”

All this makes one wonder if there is disagreement within the company about the name, or if they just haven’t made the final decision yet.

It’s obvious that the company has at least settled on Windows 8 as the official code name. A video of Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for Windows User Experience that demonstrates the UI, is titled “Building Windows 8.”

Does it even matter? After all, a rose by any other name would smell the same – but Microsoft isn’t selling roses. They’re selling software in a market that is becoming increasingly competitive. In the marketing world, names matter a lot.

Marketing is an area in which Microsoft hasn’t always excelled – and it’s something that Apple does very well. The naming scheme for OS X (Tiger, Leopard, Lion) conjures up the image of something that’s sleek and fast and powerful.

On the other hand, Microsoft has been all over the map when it comes to naming Windows. First we had version numbers (1.0 through 3.11), then year numbers (95, 98, 2000), a couple of two-letter labels (NT, ME, XP), then Vista (which Microsoft probably would like to just delete from the timeline altogether), and finally, full circle back to version numbers again with Windows 7 (well, sort of. The actual version number is 6.1).

As an OS name, Windows 8 has some advantages: It’s short and sweet and simple; it clearly identifies this version as the successor to Windows 7 and, perhaps most important, it’s already firmly established in the public mind. Let’s just hope Microsoft doesn’t find itself behind the 8-ball with the new OS.

If Microsoft does decide to break away and go with a “real name” again, rather than a number, I hope they’ll get a good theme going like Apple has, and give us some continuity. Given their “all in” philosophy, maybe they should name future operating systems after types of clouds. Windows Cirrus, anyone?

Does this really change everything?

Whatever its name ends up being, as Walt Mossberg noted during the demo, the new Windows looks very different from previous incarnations. From its v1.0 beginnings, Windows has been menu-centric. Although the look changed and got more refined over the years, most tasks were performed by clicking a menu, which opened up a list of selections. This works fine with a mouse or trackball, but on touchscreens, not so much – especially if the screen is small.

That’s one of the reasons Windows-based tablets never really caught on (along with the premium prices that the early tablet vendors put on them). It’s also the reason Windows Mobile was so frustrating for its users. Putting a desktop interface on a handheld device just didn’t work – at least, not well.

And that’s the reason Apple so often gets the credit for “changing everything” with the introduction of the iPhone and iPad. The Apple devices succeeded where others (including Apple’s own previous stab at the tablet market with the Newton) failed. That happened because they stopped trying to make a small device that worked like a desktop computer (and thus needed an input device such as a stylus to emulate the mouse) and designed iOS for a whole new way of doing things.

I read one commentary claiming that Windows 8 just “copycats” Apple. While that might be true in a very broad sense (it will have integrated touch support; it’s rumored that it will have an app store), that’s a bit like saying GM copied Ford because they started building cars with four wheels and a steering wheel in 1908, after Ford did it first in 1896.

If you watched the D9 demo, you know that Windows 8 looks nothing like either Mac OS X or iOS. The Apple products are still icon-based, whereas Windows 8 uses “live tiles” instead. At first glance, it might seem as if tiles are just big square icons that butt up more closely against each other – but the difference is in how the tiles behave, providing you with information without the need to open the program a tile represents.

In addition, tiles don’t only represent “apps.” A tile can also represent a particular website, a specific social networking contact, a location on the map, etc. You can pin tiles to your screen (we no longer seem to be calling it a “desktop”) and arrange them in groups for better organization.

This doesn’t copy Apple, but of course it’s not entirely new, either. Microsoft uses the live tile concept on Windows Phone 7, which was first introduced in February 2010 at the Mobile World Congress. The phone OS also draws on elements from the interface on the Zune music player.

But the basic look of the new Metro UI goes back further than that – it’s very familiar to fans of Windows Media Center. In fact, when I first saw the WMC edition of Windows XP, I said Microsoft should extend the pretty interface of the Media Center application to the whole OS. Who knew they were listening?

In addition to the WMC/Windows Phone 7 look and feel, Windows 8 includes some innovative elements that we haven’t seen before, such as the split keyboard that will make it easier to thumb-type on a tablet-sized device.

In the D9 demo Sinofsky’s co-presenter, Vice President Julie Larson-Green, said this is the biggest change to Windows since the switch from Windows 3.x to Windows 95. I would go even further. From the user experience point of view, this could almost rival the move from MS-DOS to Windows.

Does one design fit all?

While some are accusing Microsoft of copying Apple with Windows 8, others  think they didn’t copy Apple enough. In Jason Hiner’s Windows 8 analysis titled One Thing Right and Two Things Wrong, he takes issue with Sinofsky’s stated “no compromise” approach and says Microsoft should have created a separate tablet OS as Apple did with iOS. He argues that because it didn’t work so well to put Windows 7, which was created for the desktop, on tablets, it won’t work to put the touch-friendly Windows 8 on the desktop.

I’m not so sure of that. Based on Sinofsky’s demo, Windows 8 will offer a lot of flexibility. On the desktop, it can be touch-centric. Or it can operate as a mouse-and-keyboard OS. Or it can combine the best of both of those worlds, allowing you to interact via touch for some tasks and via traditional input devices for others. The presentation made it clear that the taskbar and menus are still lurking in there, for those who just feel more comfortable with the “old way” or who need that capability due to the lack of a touchable monitor.

I think that was a good decision. Following the demo, I heard several people bemoan the fact that the “old house” (Windows 7 style appearance with the taskbar) hasn’t been done away with completely. Apparently they have never worked with real users in the real world. I have, and while some users happily embrace a new interface, many others want the option to reap the under-the-hood benefits of a new OS without a drastic change in its look and feel (hence the popularity of the “Windows Classic” theme). Giving both groups what they want is part of the “no compromise” stance.

Had Sinofsky asked me, I wouldn’t have called it that, though. When you build a product as with everything else in life, there are always some compromises. I’d have labeled it something like “full flexibility” – because that’s really what it’s about.

I want to be able to sit on the plane or a park bench and browse the Web, check my mail, or watch a video on my slate. I want to be able to go to a meeting and take handwritten notes. Then when I get to the hotel room and need to get serious work done, I want to be able to plug in a keyboard and mouse and get down to business – without having to bring along multiple devices. I want something that lets me both consume and create content, and does the two equally well. I want the best of both worlds.

Jason worries that in trying to do the job of both desktop and tablet, Windows 8 will do neither very well. That position makes sense if you assume that there will be only one “flavor” of Windows 8. But I’m guessing we’ll see several different editions, as we do with Windows 7. And I think the edition that’s designed to run on ARM devices will be leaner and meaner than the one that’s made for enterprise desktops – while still able to do much of what full-fledged Windows can do, if that’s what you need.

I think sometimes hard core techies forget how important it is, to ordinary users, to be able to run the programs with which they’re familiar. Microsoft’s assurance that everything that runs on Windows 7 will run on Windows 8 is a big deal to those people, and just might be the deciding factor when they’re faced with the decision of which tablet to buy.

I like my Android tablet a lot, but I sometimes get frustrated with its limitations. I ditched the iPad after a few months because its functionality was even more limited. I’m excited about the possibility of more continuity across my desktop, laptop and slate, without sacrificing usability or performance. Will Microsoft pull that off? I don’t know, but if they can, it could put Windows out front in both the desktop and tablet games.

Guest Post By Debra Littlejohn Shinder of Tech Republic

By Tony Bradley, PCWorld

Internet Explorer 9 is officially here but IE9 is only compatible with Windows 7 and Windows Vista, so two-thirds of the PCs in the world can’t take advantage of it.

It may seem odd, or self-defeating that Microsoft would invest so much effort developing a next generation Web browser that isn’t compatible with Windows XP. The legacy Windows OS still enjoys greater than 50 percent market share, more than Windows 7 and Windows Vista combined but Microsoft sees the writing on the wall, and there is a key message with IE9: the operating system and hardware matter as much as the browser itself.

The difference in the IE9 experience can be dramatic depending on the underlying hardware. Microsoft could have developed a browser that was an incremental improvement over Internet Explorer 8 just for the sake of developing a new browser, and it could have maintained backward compatibility with Windows XP. However, doing so would greatly restrict what Microsoft is able to accomplish with the browser. At some point you have to cut the cord and move on to embrace the future rather than continuously coddling the past.

With Internet Explorer 9, the browser becomes a tightly integrated component of the operating system, and websites become applications that extend the desktop experience to the Web. In order to deliver adequate performance and provide the functionality Microsoft delivers with IE9, you have to have a solid operating system and hardware foundation.

Yes, Microsoft may alienate customers by not providing backwards compatibility with Windows XP but when those customers move to Windows 7, or eventually Windows 8, they will appreciate that Microsoft had the conviction to abandon backward compatibility in favour of a more immersive and integrated Web experience.

Microsoft has revealed that Internet Explorer 9 will include features to combat the tracking of online user behaviour by web sites, following the endorsement of some form of ‘Do Not Track’ mechanism by the US Federal Trade Commission.

An excerpt from the MSDN Blog is given below as an outline of the new privacy protection which will be available in Internet Explorer 9.

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Today, people share information with more websites than the ones they see in the address bar in their browser. This is inherent in the design of the web and simply how the web works, and it has potentially unintended consequences. As people visit one site, many other sites receive information about their activities. This situation results from how modern websites are built; typically a website today might bring together content from many other websites, leaving the impression that the website appears to be its own entity. When the browser calls any other website to request anything (an image, a cookie, HTML, a script that can execute), the browser explicitly provides information in order to get information. By limiting data requests to these sites, it is possible to limit the data available to these sites for collection and tracking.

A Tracking Protection List (TPL) contains web addresses that the browser will visit (or “call”) only if the user visits them directly by clicking on a link or typing their address. By limiting the calls to these websites and resources from other web pages, the TPL limits the information these other sites can collect.

You can look at this as a translation of the “Do Not Call” list from the telephone to the browser and web. It complements many of the other approaches being discussed for browser controls of Do Not Track.

What we describe here is providing a new browser mechanism for people to opt-in and exercise more control over their browsing information. By default the Tracking Protection List is empty, and the browser operates just as it does today. The list is empty by default for two reasons:

• Controlling this aspect of the browser’s behavior is up to the user. The browser vendor provides the functionality and respects the consumer’s choices here.
• Restricting content from external sites can make some functionality in sites stop working along with the other web mechanisms (cookies, web beacons, and the like) that might be essential to how the sites operate.

Anyone or any organization can create a TPL (it is just a file that can be placed on a website) and people can add and remove lists as they see fit, having more than one if they wish. To keep everyone’s experience up to date, the browser will automatically check for updates to lists on a regular basis. One change from similar features in IE8 is that once someone has added a list, Tracking Protection remains enabled across browsing sessions until it is turned off.

In addition to “Do Not Call” entries that prevent information requests to some web addresses, lists can include “OK to Call” entries that permit calls to specific addresses. In this way, a user can make exceptions to restrictions on one list easily by adding another list that includes “OK to Call” overrides for particular addresses.

We designed this feature so that users have a clear, straight forward, opt-in mechanism to enable a higher degree of control over sharing their browsing information AND websites can provide easy to use lists to manage their privacy as well as experience full-featured sites.

This is an extract of information found on the MSDN blog at the following location:

It was said last year that 2010 is a big year for Microsoft because we’re waiting to see which way the tide will turn on enterprise adoption of Windows 7. Lots of companies are on the fence about the migration, and many others have expressed the interest to upgrade from Windows XP to 7, but could ditch that idea if skipping Windows 7 develops into a corporate best practice, the same way skipping Vista did.

According to new data revealed by Microsoft, the enterprise upgrade to Windows 7 does not have much momentum so far in 2010.

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 in Washington, D.C., Microsoft Windows corporate vice president Tammi Reller said that 74% of business computers are still running Windows XP. She also said that the average age of the PC is now 4.4 years old, which is the highest number that Microsoft has seen in over a decade.

Naturally, Microsoft spins this as a huge opportunity for the company to make a lot of money by selling copies of Windows 7 to these slow upgraders. CEO Steve Ballmer predicted on Monday that Microsoft would sell 350 million copies of Windows 7 licenses by the end of 2010.

But, if you read between the lines, part of the message here is that Windows 7 adoption has not taken hold yet, and Microsoft is still hustling to convince businesses to upgrade.

Original article by Jason Hiner of Tech Republic

Reading the many blogs etc here are some of the information that is currently in the wild:

* There will be two major release dates: August 6th and October 22nd.
* TechNet/MSDN subscribers will be able to download the English language version of Windows 7 Release To Manufacturing on August 6th, other languages will be available by October 1st.
* General availability (GA) for everyone else will be on October 22nd.
* Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members will be able to get the English language Release To Manufacturing via the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal on August 16th. Other languages to be available by October 1st.
* Microsoft Action Pack will see the English language Release To Manufacturing by August 23rd, and remaining languages by October 1st.
* Volume License (VL) customers with an existing Software Assurance (SA) license will be able to download Windows 7 RTM in English starting August 7th through the Volume License Service Center (VLSC). Other languages will go online within a couple of weeks.
* Volume License customers without an existing SA license will have to wait until September 1st.
* OEMs will start seeing RTM images about two days after the RTM code is finalized, so that could be by the end of the week.

Last week, Google announced plans to release its own operating system, one that will presumably compete with Microsoft. This week, Microsoft responds with a challenge of its own.

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Last week Google announced plans to release its own operating system, one based on their Cloud technology, and one intended to compete with Microsoft’s dominance in the operating system market. It generated a lot of comments in the discussion section, with mostly a wait and see attitude towards how it will affect those in a user support position.

This week, Microsoft responds with a challenge of its own. The Financial Times (on-line) reports in its headline, “Microsoft to step up Google battle.”

“Microsoft is set to broaden its battle with Google this week,” reports the Financial Times, “as it pushes ahead with online versions of some of its core software, including final plans for a ‘cloud’ operating system designed to extend Windows to the internet. The news comes days after Google took aim at Microsoft with the announcement of a PC operating system of its own, dubbed Chrome OS.”

“The rival moves point to an intensification of the battle between the technology giants, with Google trying to extend its internet platform to PCs, and Microsoft moving in the opposite direction. While Google’s PC operating system is not due to appear in new computers until the second half of 2010, Microsoft’s cloud operating system will be launched formally this year.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking at this from two perspectives.

First of all, as those who provide support to end users, we always try to remain a step ahead of the next generation of technology. We’d like to know what’s coming. We have to decide whether or not we’ll support it, and if so, what’s the best course of action.

But secondly, I must admit, I’m watching this from the seat of a spectator, not unlike at a sporting event. We see on the field before us, two titans of technology battling each other for market dominance. We all know that a lot of technology support professionals would like to see Microsoft knocked down a few notches and are critical for its reluctance to join the open source movement. Google, on the other hand, has gotten just about as big as Microsoft, but in their own niche of technology. Google, for instance, not only dominates the search engine market, but it has actually transformed itself from a noun to a verb – something not many companies have managed to pull off. (Xerox, of course, comes to mind.)

What’s your take on this Google versus Microsoft challenge? How does it affect your role as a user support pro?

And will Google eventually become a technology demon like Microsoft has become (at least in the eyes of some)? How big will it have to get, and how much of a market share will it have to gain before technology pros want to see Google knocked down a few notches? After all, the public loves rags to riches stories, like Google, but then again, they also love to see the mighty and powerful fall.

Article written by Joe Rosberg of Tech Republic

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/helpdesk/?p=825&tag=nl.e019

Microsoft today warned that hackers are using rigged QuickTime media files to exploit an unpatched vulnerability in DirectShow, the APIs used by Windows programs for multimedia support.

The company has activated its security response process to deal with the zero-day attacks has issued a pre-patch advisory with workarounds and a one-click “fix it” feature to enable the mitigations.

From the advisory:

Microsoft is aware of limited, active attacks that use this exploit code. While our investigation is ongoing, our investigation so far has shown that Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 are vulnerable; all versions of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are not vulnerable.

An entry on the MSRC blog provides more details:

The vulnerability is in the QuickTime parser in Microsoft DirectShow. An attacker would try and exploit the vulnerability by crafting a specially formed video file and then posting it on a website or sending it as an attachment in e-mail. While this isn’t a browser vulnerability, because the vulnerability is in DirectShow, a browser-based vector is potentially accessible through any browser using media plug-ins that use DirectShow. Also, we’ve verified that it is possible to direct calls to DirectShow specifically, even if Apple’s QuickTime (which is not vulnerable) is installed.

Interestingly, the vulnerable component was removed from Windows Vista and later operating systems but is still available for use in the Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems.

Vulnerable Windows users should immediately consider disabling QuickTime parsing to thwart attackers. This KB article provides fix-it button that automatically enables the workaround.