Posted on Thursday 16th of August 2007 at 06:56 in Software

Around 25-35% of Windows XP systems are pirated (calculations included)

I stumbled across a theory today while browsing some web stats and discussing software licensing... Then it dawned on me; a few calculations later and I've estimated that somewhere from 25-35% of all Windows XP machines are illegal.

Chatting to our technical manager about licensing issues he commented that legal copies of Windows XP will automatically (and without question) install IE7 over IE6. So with that in mind, why am I seeing stats showing XP having a 75% market share but IE7 only has a 20% browser share?

According to W3Schools July 2007 shows Windows XP as having a 74.6% stake in the operating system market whereas for the same month IE7 only shows a 20.1% share. It shows IE6 as having 36.9% still which is maybe sheds some light on quite how many pirated copies of XP there are around.

How can this show piracy stats?
There are only a few ways that you can have a legal copy of Windows XP but not have Internet Explorer 7 (more on those shortly); so basically if your copy of XP is legal then you should (by all intents and purposes) be happily running IE7. You cannot get IE6 on Vista (as a primary browser, if at all) and it automatically upgrades in XP.

You *could* have a multiple install of IE6 (along with 5.5 etc) for testing purposes but you wouldn't use that testing browser as your primary means of browsing the big-wide-web. So let's look at the reasons you *may* have a legal XP but still have IE6.

Legal XP but no IE6
If you've got a copy of XP that isn't SP2 and doesn't have updates turned on then you are not only out of date but legal. You can't get IE7 without passing Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) and that doesn't occur until you're well into SP2 updates. So if you bought an old XP machine and you've turned off automatic updates (which are enabled by default) and you've not done any updates manually, then you probably have a legal XP with a valid IE6 install.

To be fair there probably aren't *that* many people in that camp. So what does this say?

You maybe have 20-25% of ALL reported Windows XP systems are pirated and therefore unable to have a valid install of IE7.
If you can't pass WGA then you can't get IE7. Yet W3Schools reported that 36.9% of their visitors in July 2007 were using IE6. If you have an over ambitious figure that 10% of users turned off updates and haven't upgraded to SP2 then you have 26.9% of XP installs are illegal. If a more realistic figure of 5% is used (which is still probably overkill) then you get 31.9% of all installs aren't legal.

Assumptions
Well, it's quite the guesstimate but you can't get IE6 on Vista and all previous versions of Windows are insignificantly small. Windows 2000 and Windows 98 are under 7% of the market combined so... If you take the 6% of Win2000 stats off the piracy figure (assuming every Windows2000 machine is using IE6) then you still have 25.9%.

So this means that somewhere from 20-35% of all Windows XP machines appear to be pirated based purely on the website stats from W3Schools and that really can't be good for Microsoft. At all. An interesting statistic that I'd not even thought of before, so this piece of content comes from the head of our technical manager - I just ran with it a bit.

W3Schools Browser Statistics
W3Schools Operating System Statistics

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Comments

Showing most recent 7 of 7 comments

ssg

Whoa there, coybow!

My home PC doesn’t have Windows installed, I run GNU/Linux at home.

My work laptop is Windows XP, SP2. I work for EDS, who employ about 120,000 people worldwide. We all have IE6 installed, apart from a small sample group who’ve been running Vista, Word 2k7 and IE7. We’re not pirates (anything but! We’re a big Microsoft partner), but we took about a year to take on WinXP SP2. We’ll take a long time to include IE7 in our standard desktop build, too.

However, whatever the standard build may determine, I’m not going to use Internet Exploiter unless I really have to. If I’ve hit any website of yours, even with my work PC, it’ll have been with Firefox.

My own website gets about 115,000 page views a month. They’re 55% Firefox, 36% Internet Explorer, with Opera, Mozilla, and Safari making up the numbers.

Of those users, 77% use Windows, and 5% use Macs - so only 36/82, or 44% of those who can use IE, do.

Internet Explorer simply does not matter any more.

It’s not about "piracy" - which is not a concept which applies to software in the first place, it’s about customer preference. Technically aware surfers do not use Internet Explorer. Why would they? Opera, Safari, Firefox offer a much better experience than the outdated IE.

On top of that, there’s the huge number of business users, like my own example, where there is no option of IE7 provided.

Steve

I disagree with your method of inferring some kind of ’magic stats number’ by combining a couple of stats (of dubious origin) with a smidgen of logic and a truckload of assumptions, but that’s a larger debate. Principally, I disagree with many of your assumptions.

Assumption:
1. W3Schools traffic is representative of the public at large. Okay, I’m not even going to point out how ridiculous that is.
2. MS has infinite power to magically cause all upgrades they ever want to happen instantly on all WinXP computers, everywhere, simultaneously. I’m sure they wish. In reality, going through WGA is a PITA. I avoided it for ages for exactly that reason. Then I realised how badly IE7 sucks, but it was too late :( They had trapped me in the next "Infinite Upgrade Loop".
Further, this assumption is provably false. If it were true, there would have been a massive step change in IE7 usage as soon as MS started forcing it down everyone’s throats. Not so. Explain.
3. Many people do not trust new software released by MS. These people are commonly known as "wise", "experienced" or "permanently scarred by prior pain" depending on perspective. Many people would not upgrade until the dust settled, especially IT departments. Maybe like the ones at Unis, with students that may be accessing W3Schools, to pick a random example.
4. Pirated systems can’t pass WGA certification. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Nuff said.

I believe your argument is demonstrated to be the special kind of genius cooked up over a beer on a paper napkin that really doesn’t look so good the next day. At least you didn’t invoke quantum dynamic effects.

Not that WinXP doesn’t get pirated, but you certainly didn’t prove anything regarding that fact.

Doug

the main problem with that theory is corporate and education sites.

my university (500 computers in the main computing room alone) are all on IE6.

however i do know people with illegal copies of windows and running IE7.

~CW~

Not the article I was talking about, but a very interesting one nonetheless:

http://tlug.jp/articles/Windows_Is_Free

Lee

There are also the herds of people forced into keeping (even using) IE6 in corporate scenarios. IE7 does break a few things and if the choice for their IT department is:
a) upgrade and fix all your intranet sites that break using IE7, or:
b) stick with IE6
... it might not be so hard to see why IE7 isn’t as prevalent as it perhaps should be.

Oli

Downloading SP2 on a legit version of XP Pro I got from work pauses the Microsoft Update process to show the IE7 splash screen and ask whether one wants to upgrade to IE7, yes/no. I chose no as I prefer FF and IE6 and think IE7 is a poor copy of FF and Opera’s functions. So, there’s at least ONE legit copy of XP Pro running only IE6.

Whether Windows is legit or not, one ALWAYS has full control over which updates are downloaded as far as I know. After all, unless you have automatic updates enabled with full system privileges requiring no confirmation from the user/sysadmin (something I’d never do), you get to tick/untick the boxes on the update page and download only those updates you require/want.

You even get to choose "Never show this update again" (something I’ve done for IE7) so I’m not sure where you got your theory in this case?

Either way, I don’t think MS is too bothered about piracy in the grand scheme (although the extra millions wouldn’t be shooed away I’m sure). The overall effect is vendor lock-in and the need to use MS products in the wider market as "everyone" uses MS Windows - even if it IS a pirated copy. So, in a way, pirated MS/commercial software supports MS’s profits and market domination in the long term. There was a decent article about this in one of the UK Linux mags recently, I believe.

Personally? I’ll just stick with Linux thanks :)
My 0.02

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Around 25-35% of Windows XP systems are pirated (calculations included)