Technology

59271 readers

3462 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

796

FTC bans antivirus giant Avast from selling its users' browsing data to advertisers (techcrunch.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

between smartphones replacing desktop PCs and mac computers, I doubt that there's "billions" of windows users left in reality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

240 million PCs were shipped last year, with about 10% being Apple. A negligible number run Linux. If we assume 5 years average life, that's still easily a billion active Windows devices.

That said, devices may not be the best metric. You mentioned users, which may use many devices. For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home, Android on my phone.

I would use web server metrics, which are an approximate indicator of time spent on each OS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I believe the yearly tally from some company aggregating website traffic came out a few months back and linux had climbed over 4% of desktop usage. Linux gamers have outnumbered mac users on steam for close to a year now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

As I said, I took issue with the plural in billionS :) that typically implies "more than two" when it's likely to be closer to 1.

For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home

poor you :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

don't forget all the office drones, who are also the main target of scammers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I didn't, but I considering the world's workforce is around 3 1/2 billion people, and that in the developed world, the percentage of office jobs is around or below 50%, however the majority of the world's work force live in underdeveloped parts of the world, I would estimate the total number of worldwide office workspaces to be significantly below a billion. And - even the number Microsoft themselves claim, appears to be only 1.5 billion total per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems - with this particular quote in the article (emphasis by me):

On 27 January 2016, Paul Thurrott summarized the operating system market, the day after Apple announced "one billion devices":

Apple's "active installed base" is now one billion devices. [..] Granted, some of those Apple devices were probably sold into the market place years ago. But that 1 billion figure can and should be compared to the numbers Microsoft touts for Windows 10 (200 million, most recently) or Windows more generally (1.5 billion active users, a number that hasn’t moved, magically, in years), and that Google touts for Android (over 1.4 billion, as of September). My understanding of iOS is that the user base was previously thought to be around 800 million strong, and when you factor out Macs and other non-iOS Apple devices, that's probably about right. But as you can see, there are three big personal computing platforms.

I think it's fair to say that "billionS" is a bit of an exaggeration - that's all I meant to point out.