Beyond VR?

If you're looking for more evidence that VR in its current incarnation has already failed, I think one need look no further than the fact that some of VR's proponents are already trying to rebrand it as something other than VR. Something more useful and less problematic, perhaps.

From Alphr:

We are at a frontier. Just ahead, almost within reach, are a series of technological developments that are finally growing out of their infancy and will change not just the way we think about technology, but the way we think about reality and existence itself.

These developments will form part of what is called extended reality, or XR. The term describes the entire spectrum of reality, from the virtual to the physical, from augmented reality to augmented virtuality, virtual reality and everything in between. But what it implies is a dramatic, potentially species-defining change in human experience.

To many people, this kind of talk will likely sound overly conceptual, but XR’s implications are highly tangible. Psychiatrists could treat a phobia using VR to simulate, with near-perfect precision, the physical and psychological environment required to induce the phobic response. At the Tribeca Film Festival, ‘Tree’ gave guests the opportunity to immerse themselves in a rainforest and take in the sights and smells of the Amazon while running their hands on the trunk of a centuries-old tree. These examples barely scratch the surface of what is possible. XR’s potential is nearly limitless and in 2018, it will arrive.

[...]

This arrival of XR represents the collapse of the virtuality/reality divide. Within the new XR framework, virtuality and reality are no longer opposites. Neither are digital and biological. XR implies a far more complex relationship between these things – one in which virtuality can make things real.

If you're thinking that this all sounds a lot like the case that VR's advocates and apologists were making for VR itself, not that long ago, then you're not alone. From the promises of "nearly limitless" and yet somehow still vague potential, with the same tired old examples that still "barely scratch the surface of what is possible," to the promise that it will all arrive next year, in exactly the same way that VR has been predicted to explode into mass adoption sometime in the next year ever since Oculus Rift was released in 2016, this is exactly the same tired, old, VR sales pitch that has utterly failed to captivate consumers for two years now, and counting.

What's new, though, is the deliberate attempt to shift the discussion away from the VR label, to a new term, "XR," which allegedly combines Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Microsoft Mixed Reality, and any other, similar technology, into a seamless spectrum that "represents the collapse of the virtuality/reality divide," with virtuality and reality ceasing to be opposites.

Of course, exactly why consumers are supposed to want this next year, when they didn't last year and don't this year, is not specified; neither is there any mention of a specific technological development or breakthrough which will make this happen (next year, remember), in precisely the way that all existing VR/AR/MR headsets have so far failed to achieve. There's still no mention of a specific use for "XR" which is quantitatively different from any existing experience, desirable for the average consumer, and which also requires "XR" technology in a way that simply isn't the case for existing VR technology.

That qualitative enhancements to existing experiences are simply not enough to shift large volumes of expensive VR headset is plainly evident in VR's still-lacklustre sales numbers, and in the VR content developers who are retooling VR offerings to work without the tech. Neither is there any reason to think that the "XR" technologies of literally tomorrow will be able to "simulate, with near-perfect precision," any sort of environment at all, when existing VR headsets can't, and when the PCs that drive them are not increasing significantly in processing power. Have I mentioned lately that Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore? And while VR hardware developers are making incremental improvements by iterating on the display technology, there are any number of other problems with VR that aren't directly related to the quality and feature sets of the displays.

Let's be clear: VR is not currently a thing. It wasn't a thing last year, it didn't become a thing this year, and absent divine intervention, it's not going to become a thing next year, either. AR might have more potential, as demonstrated by the likes of Pokemon Go, but it's still in a profoundly primitive state, and years away from enabling any "dramatic, potentially species-defining change in human experience." While machine learning and automation are definitely fuelling profound changes our society and economy (the Singularity, already in progress), there's no reason to think that it's going to have any specific application to VR/AR any time soon. And Microsoft's "MR" headsets are just VR headsets with different branding... which is exactly what is being attempted in Alphr's article.

"XR" is not on the verge of taking off, any more than VR is on the verge of taking off, and the folks at Alphr are whistling past the graveyard. I stand by my prediction: VR will continue to not be a thing, and 2018 will be the year when tech media outlets finally start to admit it.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew scraps its VR requirement

I think it's fair to say that Star Trek: Bridge Crew was one of the most-anticipated VR titles of the year. Hell, a game that puts you on the bridge of a Star Fleet cruiser, like, actually virtually there? Even my VR-hating heart could see the appeal of that one.

The problem, though, is that ST:BC is a multiplayer game, and thus was only really playable with other (VR-equipped) players... of which there are none, since VR isn't a thing yet. So it's not surprising that Ubisoft, in a belated and desperate bid to prevent their online multiplayer game from dying on the vine, in spite of its Star Trek IP, have decided to remove ST:BC's VR requirement.

As reported by WCCFTech:

Hey nerds, have you always dreamed of stepping aboard the bridge of a Starfleet cruiser, but don’t want to shell out for a VR headset to play Star Trek: Bridge Crew? Well, you’re in luck, as Ubisoft has released a new patch which removes the game’s VR requirements. Now everybody can blast a few Klingons with friends!

[...]

Star Trek: Bridge Crew isn’t abandoning VR by any means – in fact, the non-VR patch also adds support for Microsoft mixed-reality headsets. Regardless of how you may choose to play, Bridge crew lets everybody join games together.

Apart from its rather boosterish tone (rather unlike WCCFTech's normal "Where Consumers Come First" style, frankly), which is obviously just copypasted from a press release, the basic event here is pretty starkly obvious. Brave talk of Microsoft mixed reality (MMR?) headsets aside, VR development is such a money-sucking pit right now that even a developer the size of Ubisoft can't afford to release VR-exclusive games, and keep them exclusive to VR.

Also, the fact that ST:BC is playable without VR speaks quite eloquently to the fact that VR isn't enabling anything by way of new gameplay, here - it's just qualitative enhancement, not quantitative enablement, which is not enough to sell VR to the masses. It still a little early to call this one, but I'm feeling pretty confident about my VR prediction for the upcoming year.

LOL. Microsoft store denied! by Google.

Well played, Google. Well played.

As reported by The Verge:

In a surprise move, Google has published Chrome in the Windows Store this week, but not in the way you might be expecting.

Google has simply packaged an app for Windows 10 that opens itself to the Chrome download page. Downloading Chrome will then open up the link in your default Windows 10 browser. It’s a hilarious snub of the Windows Store, and makes it clear Google isn’t planning to bring its browser to Microsoft’s store any time soon.

There are many reasons Google won’t likely bring Chrome to the Windows Store, but the primary reason is probably related to Microsoft’s Windows 10 S restrictions. Windows Store apps that browse the web must use HTML and JavaScript engines provided by Windows 10, and Google’s Chrome browser uses its own Blink rendering engine. Google would have to create a special Chrome app specifically for Windows 10 S, much like it would have needed to do to support Windows Phone years ago. It’s extremely unlikely that Google is even considering the work involved in such a project.

It's good business, and good trolling, all in one tiny gesture. This "app" won't help anyone on Windows 10 S who wants to use Chrome, of course, but there are so few of them that it's not especially likely that Google gives a shit.

Or, as Mehedi Hassan at Thurrott.com puts it:

At the end of the day, the Google Chrome Installer is still very, very pointless — the only functionality of the so-called installer is to open the download link for Chrome on your default browser. It basically removes the need for you to open Internet Explorer (or Microsoft Edge) and manually go to the Chrome download page everytime you set up a new Windows 10 installation.

-5/5 stars.

That's not pointless at all; that's some solid value. If there's anything pointless in this picture, it would have to be the Windows Microsoft Store itself.

Oh, well. Maybe next year...

UPDATED DEC. 20th:

Aaaaaaaand it's gone. From The Verge:

Google published a Chrome app in the Windows Store earlier today, which just directed users to a download link to install the browser. Microsoft isn’t impressed with Google’s obvious snub of the Windows Store, and it’s taking action. “We have removed the Google Chrome Installer App from Microsoft Store, as it violates our Microsoft Store policies,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.

Citing the need to ensure apps “provide unique and distinct value,” Microsoft says “we welcome Google to build a Microsoft Store browser app compliant with our Microsoft Store policies.” That’s an invitation that Google is unlikely to accept.

[...]

The Verge understands Google created this installer app to combat the fake Chrome apps that can be found in the Windows Store, a problem Microsoft has been trying to address for years. Google’s workaround has now been removed from the Windows Store, so Windows 10 users will have to continue using Microsoft Edge to access the download site for Chrome if they want to access Google’s browser.

Wow. You'd almost think that Microsoft lack a sense of humour about their horrible digital storefront.

Nintendo Switch scores 10 million sold

As any regular reader of this blog knows (yes, all two of you, ☺), I did not think that Nintendo would pull this off.

After a whole year of production and supply-chain problems, and with no clear or specific indications from Nintendo themselves that they'd actually solved those problems in time to capitalize on the busy holiday shopping season (their CEO recently responded to questions about this XMas' Switch supplies by talking up their plans for the 1st quarter of next year, for fuck's sake), and with them only sitting at 7 millions sold by the end of October, I really didn't think they'd sell another 3 million units by the end of December, a pace which was 3.42 times faster than the 875K per month that they'd averaged all year to that point.

And, guess what? They didn't do 3M more in sales by the end of December.

They did it by the end of November.

As reported by Erie News Now (who got the story from CNNMoney):

Nintendo just confirmed what we already knew: its hybrid gaming system is a hit.

The company said on Tuesday the Nintendo Switch -- one part mobile, one part home console -- has sold 10 million units since its March 2017 launch.

The announcement comes less than two months after Nintendo increased its fiscal-year projection, ending March 31, 2018, from 10 million to 14 million units sold. Nintendo expects operating profit for the year to hit $1.06 billion, up from its original projection of $572 million.[...] By contrast, the Wii U sold just over 13 million units since its 2012 launch, before it was discontinued earlier this year.

It would seem that there were plenty of Nintendo Switches available for sale on Black Friday, after all, and that basically all of them were indeed sold. Even if this recent number is slightly padded, and even if there aren't a lot of Switches left to sell for the rest of the month (something I wouldn't bet on, anymore, BTW), it's now entirely possible for Nintendo to exit 2017 on a solid pace to hit their end of March target, after all.

With their 2DS line, the NES Classic, and the SNES Classic also selling really well, there's just no doubt about it: Nintendo are having a hell of a year, and their big gamble on the Nintendo Switch really has paid off, in a way which should be sustainable long-term. The fact that they're now seeing some solid third-party exclusive releases for the Switch, like the recently-announced Bayonetta 3, cements the situation for them. No wonder Sony finally decided to take the Switch seriously, in the form of some serious price cuts to their PS4, PS4 Pro, and PSVR.

So, congratulations, Nintendo! You've pitched me a strike already, and we're not even close to the end of the year yet.

Prognostication Scorecard: 1-1-4

One right, one wrong, with 4 as yet To Be Determined.

Nintendo Switch Prediction: 

• The Switch may move another million or so units over the holidays, but it won't hit the 10 million mark by the end of December, and will fall well short of Nintendo's 15-million-by-March target. WRONG! (See above.)

PS4 & XBOX Predictions: 

• Sony will try harder, now that they have a PlayStation head who isn't retiring, although exactly what a Cloud-based PS4 will look like, or how Sony chose to react to the challenge from Nintendo, if at all, remain to be seen. RIGHT! Price cuts count as trying harder. Cloud-based PS4 offerings are still pretty fucking vague.
• PSN/Steam crossplay is a possibility here, especially in light of Valve's recently-announced trust-based CS:GO matchmaking system -- House was against crossplay, but Kodera might change course. TBD. We might not know this one until the end of 2018.
• Microsoft simply didn't get the XBO-X to market in time; it will sell well enough this holiday season, but not well enough for them to gain ground on Sony, and Nintendo's Switch will outsell their XBOX throughout the coming year. They'll still end 2018 as the #2 console, but not by much. TBD. XBOX seems to be selling well enough, but no numbers yet.

VR Prediction: 

• No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing. TBD. We might not know the outcome of this one until the end of March.

Windows 10 Prediction: 

• No big developments for at least three months here, either. TBD. NMS's recently revamped numbers look slightly better for Windows 10, but don't show a huge swing yet.

Thanks, but I’m still saying no to Windows 10

This article, by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Tech World, really tickled my fancy this morning:

I’ve been hearing a lot from friends recently about how Windows 10 is the best Windows ever and people would be stupid not to switch. These being friends, I don’t want to be rude, but — cough, ahem — I don’t buy it.

Is security your No. 1 concern? Well, Windows 10 is no more secure than Windows 7 — which is to say it is a profoundly insecure operating system. There have been a lot of serious Windows security patches in the last year, and Windows 10 had all the same problems as Windows 7.

[...]

I also wouldn’t care to be “upgraded” against my will, as happened to Windows 10 users who had toggled what they needed to toggle to tell Microsoft, “Please don’t move me from Windows 10 1703, Windows 10 Fall Update, to 1709, Fall Creators Update.” As my colleague Woody Leonhard points out, this happened via Windows Update with the November patches, when there were “so many issues with this month’s security patches that it’s hard to decide where to begin.”

By the way, I want it on record that I don’t want Windows 10’s rapid release cadence, with its short-lived support timelines. Two major upgrades — or service patches, as I still think of them — a year is one too many. I can’t make sure everything works with a significant update every six months. I don’t know anyone who can.

[...]

What it all adds up to is that, while Windows 10 is certainly a good operating system, it’s far from great. For the time being, I’m sticking with Windows 7 on my Windows machines, and I recommend you do too. I know what to expect from Windows 7, but with Windows 10, every new forced update is a roll of the dice.

Great stuff, and well worth a read, so go give the man some clicks. And if you haven't switch from Windows 7 to 10 yet, either... well, I also recommend that you don't. I haven't, and still don't plan to. Not unless Microsoft get a handle on their anti-consumer bullshit, anyway, which doesn't look like it's going to be happening anytime soon.

Skyrim VR is everything wrong with VR

According to Sidney Fussell at Gizmodo, anyway:

The best way to describe the sometimes thrilling and sometimes nauseating Skyrim VR experience is as an incredible chair. Just imagine yourself in a movie theater, reclining in an enormously luxe, obsidian-black leather seat. The design is contoured perfectly to align your neck and spine, while the arm rests make you feel weightless, as if you’re lying on a California King sized cloud. Then, the movie starts. The 50-foot screen is playing one foot from your face. Suddenly, arm and neck restraints burst from the chair and you sit there, your arms bound and your eyes brutalized in luxuriant agony.

Because however well realized the world in Skyrim VR is, it’s still just elaborate armchair tourism. Whether using the PS4 DualShock controller or Playstation Move controllers, I’m still sitting in that chair, just like I was in 2011 when I bought the PS3 version of the game. While walking through the towns or exploring a field, I feel more like a disembodied camera than an actual person occupying space. It feels like a missed opportunity. The same way a Google Daydream user experiences the Taj Mahal, the game gives players a novel way of exploring Skyrim without actually inhabiting it.

[...]

Skyrim VR is probably the best of the “the same thing but in VR” titles, but hopefully it signals the end of them. Because while there are many technical limitations to creating VR games (to say nothing of our limited ability to even stomach playing them) developers need to start thinking natively in VR now if VR is to stand on its own as more than a landing spot for cash-grab re-release in an industry in love with redundancy.

For the record, there are a lot of things wrong with VR beyond the fact that even the best VR games tend to be better without the VR, and I've blogged about them extensively. Still the fact that VR still doesn't enable any quantitatively new experiences, and only allows for qualitatively enhance experiences like Skyrim VR, might be one of its biggest problems, and developers do need to start thinking natively in VR if they're ever to figure out what VR technology is actually good for.

Which is why it's... awkward that there's no money to be made in VR development, and thus no budgets to speak of for the native in VR/exclusive to VR applications that Fussell is calling for. Which probably means that it not only won't happen, it can't happen... unless VR suddenly takes of in spite of a total lack of native VR content, of course, but that seems unlikely.

So... VR is still not a thing, and it will clearly take more than yet another half-hearted Skyrim port from Bethesda to change that.

Windows 7 continues to gain Steam.

Pun not only intended, but verily provoked by this post from Wayne Williams at Betanews:

While Windows 10 still lags behind Windows 7 in terms of market share, there’s one section of user that has embraced the new operating system since day one -- gamers. That’s no surprise of course, as they like to run the latest and greatest hardware and software.

Steam’s monthly usage survey, which shows the state of things from the gamers’ perspective, has consistently reported Windows 10 as the top operating system of choice, until last month when -- to the surprise of many -- Windows 7 took over.

[...]

According the latest figures, Windows 10 fell another 5.05 percentage points. It now accounts for 23.94 share (23.64 percent for the 64-bit build, and 0.29 percent for the 32-bit edition). Windows 7’s share grew by 6.21 percentage points. It now has 71.3 percent (69.89 percent for the 64-bit OS, and 1.41 for the 32-bit build).

[...]

As was the case last month, Simplified Chinese is now by far and away the most popular language used on Steam (64.35 percent, as opposed to 17.02 percent using English), and its share grew 8.23 percentage points in November, no doubt accounting for Windows 7’s latest growth spurt.

This is fascinating; especially in a month when NetMarketShare are showing a fairly strong performance by Windows 10. The likes of NMS and StatCounter are clearly weighting heavily in favour of NA; Steam, on the other hand, is finally showing a more globalist picture by including gamers from the country with the largest population on Earth, and producing exactly the opposite result in the process.

It's enough to make one wonder to what extent any of these OS market share statistics are actually measuring the state of the market. Are they all just sampling different slices of the market, weighting it according to preconceptions that aren't documented anywhere, and then presenting results as fact that are really little better than guesswork? Is it all just "lying with statistics?" And, if so, are there any viable alternatives?

I've spent a lot of time watching the OS market share numbers in the last couple of years, along with other tech media web sites and bloggers, as we try to assess how well (or poorly) Windows 10's performance is proceeding, and the prospect of it all being wasted effort, effectively tracking phantoms through fog, is... well, somewhat depressing, to be honest. It's important to know whether Microsoft's bad GWX behaviour is being rewarded, though, so we do need some way to gauge that performance. So, what's a blogger to do?

One can try to take all of the numbers with a grain of salt, of course, but that's hard to do in practice; the natural human tendency is to focus on the numbers that align with your expectations, while giving shorter shrift to the numbers that don't seem to "fit." It doesn't help much that the various statistic reports use slightly variant, "black box" methodologies, which means that they actually are measuring slightly different things, massaging their raw numbers in slightly different ways, and keeping us basically in the dark about how and why they do all of it.

I don't think that I can stop watching the OS market share numbers; after two years of watching the story unfold, I find that I now want to know how the story ends, even though the plot of this movie has enough holes in it to drive a bus through. So, I'll keep on keeping on... I just won't be enjoying it as much as I might have.

Which hardly makes me unique; it seems like fewer tech bloggers are bothering to make note of the latest market share numbers anymore, presumably because they're blogging for money and articles on this topic get fewer clicks, thus reinforcing their natural ennui with market forces. Still, as long as Wayne Williams keeps on keeping on, I guess I can, too.

I will also be learning Chinese in my spare time, though. Because it's looking more and more like that's a smart thing to do, just generally. (Seriously, only seventeen percent? English needs to step up its fucking game...)

I, for one, will welcome our new computer overlords...

Still don't think that the Singularity is underway? Well, check our the next thing in AI, as reported by Science Alert:

In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that's capable of generating its own AIs.
More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a 'child' that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.

The Google researchers automated the design of machine learning models using an approach called reinforcement learning. AutoML acts as a controller neural network that develops a child AI network for a specific task.

For this particular child AI, which the researchers called NASNet, the task was recognising objects - people, cars, traffic lights, handbags, backpacks, etc. - in a video in real-time.

AutoML would evaluate NASNet's performance and use that information to improve its child AI, repeating the process thousands of times.

When tested on the ImageNet image classification and COCO object detection data sets, which the Google researchers call "two of the most respected large-scale academic data sets in computer vision," NASNet outperformed all other computer vision systems.

Being able to automate the task of programming teaching automation systems is obviously the next level here, and has the potential to greatly accelerate the process of developing and deploying machine learning systems that outperform anything currently in use. This has the potential to rapidly and significantly improve all of our current machine learning systems and applications, of course, including e.g. self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles (or, Autos).

It also adds an extra layer of opacity to the process; Google is already heavily dependent on effectively black box algorithms, and struggling to explain decisions made in an emergent manner by systems that are already too complex to be easily understood by the humans who nominally designed them, and this new technology will result in systems that we barely understand designing systems, on their own, that humans won't understand at all... and eventually trusting them to manage all the nuts and bolts of our institutions. This raises some pretty obvious concerns, and Science Alert's article  doesn't overlook them:

Though the applications for NASNet and AutoML are plentiful, the creation of an AI that can build AI does raise some concerns. For instance, what's to prevent the parent from passing down unwanted biases to its child?

What if AutoML creates systems so fast that society can't keep up? It's not very difficult to see how NASNet could be employed in automated surveillance systems in the near future, perhaps sooner than regulations could be put in place to control such systems.

It's at this point that I'd like to say that I, for one, will welcome our new computer overlords. I now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.

NetMarketShare's new online tools are more powerful than I first suspected... and also confusing...

Of all the ways in which NMS's free stat reports have annoyed me over the years, the most annoying is the way they segregate results. You can compare OS market share across desktop devices, for example, or across mobile devices, but not both at the same time... so you can't compare, say, Windows to Android, to see their growth and trends over time relative to each other.

StatCounter does offer this sort of comparison, but only as an overall picture (i.e. all Windows versions, all Android versions, all iOS and MacOS versions, &c.), which make for simple graphs... but if you do want to drill down a bit, you can only drill into one OS at a time. You can't, for example, compare Windows 10 and Windows 7 to the most popular versions of iOS, MacOS, and/or Android, all at once.

Apparently neither NMS nor StatCounter thought that people would want to do this... or, perhaps they did know that people would want to do this, and simply decided to reserve the more powerful functionality for their paid subscription services. Which is entirely fair; after all, these are businesses and not charities, and they have to make money somehow. I get that. As a dedicated online freeloader, though, I still found it ever so slightly irritating.

But the game has changed, thanks to NetMarketShare's brand new online tools, which were "completely rearchitected [...] to provide more accurate and accessible data," actually do allow you to pull from multiple datasets at once, making possible exactly the kinds of extremely nerdy comparisons that I've been idly wishing I could do, without having to pay to do them.

The results are, to say the least, surprising:

The surprise? According to NMS, Android is still only 33.48% of the market, well behind Windows' 45.41%. This is surprising because, to quote Wikipedia:

According to a January 2015 Gartner report, "Android surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014, and will continue to grow at a double-digit pace in 2015, with a 26 percent increase year over year." This made it the first time that any general-purpose operating system has reached more than one billion end users within a year: by reaching close to 1.16 billion end users in 2014, Android shipped over four times more than iOS and OS X combined, and over three times more than Microsoft Windows. Gartner expected the whole mobile phone market to "reach two billion units in 2016", including Android.^[307] Describing the statistics, Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times that "About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. [It] has become Earth’s dominant computing platform."^[18]

StatCounter disagrees with both assessments, clocking both Android and Windows at about 38% of the market, but with Windows' share of the combined OS market growing in recent months... which makes no sense, since desktop/laptop PC sales have been declining.




I know that NMS revamped their product to remove botnet traffic, but why would that affect Android's numbers? Are Android botnets a widespread thing that nobody knows about, or can detect, except NetMarketShare for some fucking reason? It makes even less sense than the effect on Linux' numbers. And how have Gartner, StatCounter, and NetMarketShare all ended up with such apparently divergent results? Seriously, WTF is going on?

I think I want to see some serious critique of NMS's new product/methodology. Their new online tools look very slick and very powerful, but if their data collection and analytical methology is badly flawed, then their online tools may be useless, no matter how slick or powerful they seem.

NMS make major changes, and finally explain themselves.

I'm quite late posting today's OS market share numbers, in part because I honestly wasn't expecting much to change from last month. Well, was I ever wrong on that, because NetMarketShare have changed just about everything... and, more importantly, they've finally explained why:

Welcome to the new NetMarketShare.com

---

We completely rearchitected the product to provide more accurate and accessible data. Here's what's new:

Elimination of botnet data

---

As bot traffic across the web has risen dramatically, it has been a challenge to detect and remove it from our dataset. This is a critical issue since bots can cause significant skewing of data. In particular, we have seen situations where traffic from certain large countries is almost completely bot traffic. In other countries, ad fraudsters generate traffic that spoofs certain technologies in order to generate high-value clicks. Or, they heavily favor a particular browser or platform.

The primary focus of this release was to build detection methods to eliminate this traffic. We rewrote the entire collection and aggregation infrastucture to address this issue.

Please note: This dataset is separate from and replaces the legacy data. Subscribers that need legacy data please contact us for access.

The "bot traffic" explanation is... plausible, actually. Bots are a huge online problem, and for a business whose business is measuring online traffic, it makes sense that large-volume bot activity would seriously mess with their data, and their analyses.

For the tracking of OS usage numbers, of course, this basically renders every previously posted result (i.e. the "legacy data") completely irrelevant. Therefore, I will let it go, and start over fresh, much as NMS have themselves. It's important to keep some sense of the history here, through, so... let's see what NMS have on tap for history.

Annoyingly, the new table which accompanies this graph doesn't break out each month's numbers in a nice grid, but rather shows only the average for the period. Each month's numbers are only available as mouse-over tooltips, which is worse for at-a-glance comparisons but probably better for NMS's business model (which is, after all, to sell the numbers to subscribers). Also, the new NMS data doesn't go all the way back to Windows 10's launch, so we can only look at the range from May of 2016 through the end of November, 2017.

Even so, the botnet-less trend lines look rather different than the botnet-filled versions. Mousing over the data points on that graph, we can learn that Windows 7 currently holds 43.12% of the market, basically unchanged from last month's 43.05%, while Windows 10 holds 31.95% of the market, an uptick from last month's 28.86%. Interestingly, Windows 10's growth has come mostly at the expense of Windows XP, which declined from 7.64% to 5.73%.

Generic "Linux" only shows up as 1.65% of the market, down slightly from last month's 1.85%, although that doesn't include Ubuntu (which is also Linux) or Chrome OS (which is also Linux), etc. That kind of fragmentation is part of the problem that Linux has in attracting new users, though, so that seems fair enough, and at least NMS is now listing Chrome OS separately as a desktop OS, which will allow us to track its progress over time - potentially very interesting. Combining all the various versions of each OS together gives a better overall picture of how Linux-based OSes compare to Windows:

Exactly why botnets would be inflating Linux' OS market share numbers, rather than Windows', is something that I'd like to see explained in more detail at some point. Linux is famously more secure than Windows, generally, so it would make far more sense for botnet traffic to be inflating Windows' market share results, instead. I'll be keeping an eye out for a better explanation there.

In the meantime, though, we have a new, and hopefully more reliable, baseline for watching the progress of the OS market from this point on. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I'm still not expecting to see much movement for the next few months, for the reasons previously stated, but I wasn't expecting NMS to revamp their entire business in a month, either, so who the fuck knows? If nothing else, it should be interesting to see what happens.