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Re: [RRG] What does incremental deployment mean




On Mar 25, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Randall Atkinson wrote:
Earlier, Dino wrote:
% Even if everyone had Windows Update enabled, it would take too long to
% get every system upgraded.

I am told the majority of Windows systems are updated each month,
and that within 3 months the overwhelming majority of Windows systems
have been updated.

Define "overwhelming majority".

Rather than just pontificate, I will try and provide some possibly useful data.
Here is a summary of last week's access
from one of my web servers (various sites including parts of AmericaFree.TV; statistics
based on the Apache web server logs) :

OS Build = Windows NT 5.1 | Hits = 414124 or 62.84 % OS Build = Windows NT 6.0 | Hits = 101704 or 15.43 % OS Build = unknown | Hits = 54129 or 8.21 % OS Build = Intel Mac OS X | Hits = 22148 or 3.36 % OS Build = Windows NT 5.0 | Hits = 21654 or 3.29 % OS Build = Linux i686 | Hits = 18308 or 2.78 % OS Build = PPC Mac OS X Mach-O | Hits = 7077 or 1.07 % OS Build = PPC Mac OS X | Hits = 5861 or 0.89 % OS Build = AOLBuild 4334.34 | Hits = 2205 or 0.33 % OS Build = Windows 98 | Hits = 1904 or 0.29 %

To translate to marketing speak

Windows NT 5.0 = Windows 2000
Windows NT 5.1 = Windows XP
Windows NT 6.0 = Windows Vista

There is a lot of this material available, in my experience the relative proportions change pretty slowly with time and are pretty consistent across sites.

Distributing "unknown" among the OS types proportional to their announced use, I somehow doubt that the 4.4 % of Windows users using Windows 98 and Windows 2000 update at all, and I wonder about the majority of the users using using Windows XP. (I would also wonder if Microsoft would commit to upgrading an old OS, XP, with some new routing stuff in the kernel.)

So, I would conclude that for sure ~4 % of Windows users don't update often, and it is possible a majority doesn't.
I'm with Dino here.

Regards
Marshall




Three months clearly is not "too long", and that seems to be the time
frame -- according to folks I've talked with at Microsoft. Perhaps someone
at Microsoft can provide specific numbers to clarify.

% The most popular network-based application is your favorite browser.
% How many of them are not on the latest rev?

Upgrading a stack and upgrading a particular application are not similar.
For security reasons, most Windows users do have Windows Update
enabled these days.  That might not have been true 8-10 years ago,
I don't know, but it is reportedly true today.

Similarly, MacOS X users overwhelmingly apply patches/upgrades within
a week or so of their becoming available.

% Upgrading roughly 2 to 4 CE routers at every site on the Internet will
% happen in far less time than changing every host.

I know of a number of sites still with AGS+ and even CGS boxes deployed,
so it is not at all clear that claim is true.

However, regardless of what one thinks, this thread isn't going to converge this RG membership anytime soon on this topic. Probably best for everyone
to move along...

Ran


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