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How big is yours?

During Steven Sinofsky’s keynote on Day 2 of the PDC09, he spoke how the windows team uses all the data they collect to make decisions about features and fix bug.

One thing that I found really interesting was the statistic about screen resolutions

Here’s the slide…

clip_image001

What surprised so many folks was that 1024 x 768 is such a dominant screen resolution. (I’m in that < .05% running at 1900 x 1200)

It made me wonder about the visitors to this blog and their screen resolution. The data shows something a bit different

Resolution %
1280x1024 38%
Unknown 38%
1024x768 19%
1600x1200 2%
800x600 2%
1152x864 2%
640x480 0%

image

It’s a different distribution, which makes sense since the folks who visit my blog would have higher resolution monitors – at least that’s my theory.

I also wonder what that that large “unknown” is? Could it be spiders crawling my blog?? or mobile devices maybe? i don’t really know.



Published Monday, November 23, 2009 4:00 PM by frankarr
Filed under: ,

Comments

Monday, November 23, 2009 8:07 PM by Andrew Parsons

# re: How big is yours?

I wonder about the unknown bucket too.

Could it also be:

non-standard resolutions (mine is 1920x1080 - true 1080p)?

multi-monitor setups?

machines with the info/cookies disabled?

other OS machines that don't even report that info?

Monday, November 23, 2009 8:57 PM by fowl

# re: How big is yours?

I wonder what portion of their data is screwed around with by VM's? I mean, that's about the only place a sane person could tolerate 1024x768, right?

(if you say otherwise, for example by suggesting that people _like_ svga, then my faith in humanity will be destroyed ;)

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 3:30 AM by Andy

# re: How big is yours?

What's also interesting is the big slice of users with 800x600 resolution, about 17% from the blue slice of Sinofsky’s pie above.

Many machines are deployed using SOE to government and large corporations. It's easy to find fleets of 60,000 machines or more. If the SOE build is set to 1024x768, that's what you get...

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 4:51 AM by Edward

# re: How big is yours?

Do you really need to have a sexual innuendo for a title of an otherwise interesting blog item?

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 10:23 AM by Ingoal

# re: How big is yours?

My main computer uses a 24" screen with the 1900x1200 resolution, on my other pc I use a 22" with 1680x1050...on my laptop it's 1280x800...you see, I love "widescreens" :-)

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 1:36 PM by Michael Kordahi

# re: How big is yours?

Me thinks the reason for such a difference between Sinofsky and your data is simple. You attract a tech'ier crowd who would typically have higher resolutions.

I've noticed the same with browser stats, they differ depending on the type of audience that site attracts.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 4:58 PM by Craig

# re: How big is yours?

I agree with fowl, I suspect it's VMs distorting the picture (given that both 1024x768 and 800x600 are so highly ranked).

I guess it's all about "when" Win7 reports it's screen size. If it's based on at boot time (physical login screen) then VMs ( not just dev boxen, but VDI farms, etc) no doubt report a lower res than what's actually used (via remote desktop client).

It's also possible that all those Netbooks running Win7 are also distorting it.

Our public website (corporate orientated) also has 1024x768 sitting at #1 with 30+%. 800x600 is at #9 with 1.2%.  Just noticed that Google Analytics doesn't recognise Win7 :)

Friday, November 27, 2009 8:08 PM by Jim

# re: How big is yours?

I didn't realize that 1600x900 was not at all that common. 20" widescreen.

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