

Microsoft won't say exactly how many windows 8 machines are being used







Source: Computerworld

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"Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By SoCalBoomer on 5/13/2013 4:22:12 PM , Rating: 5
Coming up with a number in the face of Microsoft's refusal to divulge activation data risks wild inaccuracies.

While I don't believe that 100M is the number of active licenses, I do believe there is a reasonable explanation. Since MS doesn't sell computers (aside from the Surfaces) a large number of those licenses are always in the pipeline. That's the way it worked with Win7, with XP, with Vista, with all versions.

The company doing the statistics is using web reporting, which is flawed. It measures only those visiting its reporting sites. It also measures only those that are reporting their information accurately (mine don't - scripting is turned off)

In addition,
the firm massages its raw data
which always leads me to be suspicious - weighting the data by country of origin. . . why?

Not that I use Win8 much (it's on one machine - a Dell XPS12Duo, where it's appropriate and works well) and don't really care. But I HATE articles that are misleading like this - propagating misleading articles themselves.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By max_payne on 5/13/2013 4:46:06 PM , Rating: 2
To have a better idea, a more reliable source I believe will be They have cookies on about every machine in the world! They have a nice site which you can see informative figures. In the US, windows 8 usage is 3.34% (from Nov 2012 to April 2013). Worldwide, it is 2.88% while 7 is 53%.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By Solandri on 5/13/2013 5:10:25 PM , Rating: 2
Statcounter only counts hits, they don't correct for unique visitors. This distinction has been abused in the past by iPhone proponents who look at data only from sites which count unique visitors, and (wrongly) conclude that the iPhone has a huge lead and Android users only casually browse the web. When statcounter shows that Android traffic has exceeded iPhone traffic since 2011, meaning that in fact it is the iPhone users who only casually use the web. Most of the hardcore users who browse the web on their phone are on Android.

Anyway, in this case you want it the other way around. You want to count unique visitors to see how widely Win 8 has been adopted.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
That's an interesting point. This is their reasoning behind that ;

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By kingmotley on 5/13/2013 5:27:30 PM , Rating: 2
Statcounter isn't a very popular service. It only tracks 50 million page views a month, which is pretty darn small.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By Schmide on 5/13/2013 5:48:12 PM , Rating: 3
Yet more than large enough...

Using statical sample size calculations


N = population size > 20k
r = 50% responses you are interested in
c = 95% confidence

blah blah blah

Min samples needed for confidence of 95% +- 5% = 377

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By Mint on 5/13/2013 7:07:24 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, if you're doing truly unbiased random samples.

There's no way for statcounter to ensure that.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By Schmide on 5/13/2013 8:02:43 PM , Rating: 2
Every sample has a bias Dude, that's the nature of the beast.

The issue was how many samples do you need to quantify the confidence factor. The above holds true for even the most biased sample.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By Mint on 5/14/2013 11:22:55 AM , Rating: 2
Of course it doesn't. Biased sampling makes that calculated confidence interval completely meaningless. Go look at the assumptions in the derivation of the formulae you used.

Looking at all the hits to a particular set of websites is clustered sampling. On top of that, how you chose those websites is prone to bias as well.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By Schmide on 5/14/2013 4:22:06 PM , Rating: 2
I really don't understand your adversity? You seem to poo poo the data regardless of which type of opposition you choose, lack of samples vs biased data.

Biased sampling makes that calculated confidence interval completely meaningless.

Actually they are completely independent of each other!!!

Regardless of all this there isn't some magical error term that is going to sway these numbers in any dramatic fashion.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By BRB29 on 5/14/2013 7:35:54 AM , Rating: 2
at 15 billion samples, it's more than enough to do 99% confidence.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By max_payne on 5/13/2013 6:46:57 PM , Rating: 2
I think you have it wrong. It's 50 billions page/month.

"In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 15 billion pages views per month, by people from all over the world onto our 3 million+ member sites".

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
Even better explanation:



RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."

So what I'm saying is you are full of crap.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By Integral9 on 5/14/2013 8:33:37 AM , Rating: 2
You might want to check out your user agent string. I don't believe it requires any scripting and your browser sends it out very early in the communication with each website you visit so that the website can deliver content to you that your browser / device can handle.

RE: "Wild inaccuracies. . ."
By melgross on 5/14/2013 9:59:42 AM , Rating: 2
The data is far better than what Microsoft gives us, which is nothing. They weight the data per country because we do know what percentage of people have computers country by country. We know what the breakdown is by Linux, OS X and Windows. We know the population of the country. And we know how Internet services are country by country.

So by using those, and possibly other factors, they can get a fairly accurate accounting. Sure, there will be one in a million who turn off some minor service such as you do, but that's such a small number, it gets lost in the noise.

