In news that would surprise few but delight many, Windows XP continued shedding its user base in the month of November. Make no mistake, it is still a very popular operating system less than six months before its official retirement.
An official retirement that has already been delayed once in the past.
But this time Microsoft seems put — it has made it clear that support and patches for the old operating system are set to stop come April 8, 2014. In fact, Redmond and its partners are spending good money trying to spread the awareness and help users migrate to a newer version of Windows.
And the efforts seem to be paying off, bit by bit, percentage point by percentage point.
The latest statistics from StatCounter for the first 25 days of November 2013 reveal that the Windows XP user base is slowly jumping ship. At this point in time, it is installed on some 19.31 percent of computers the world over, down from 19.44 last week.
This, as you may gauge, is as substantial a drop in the span of seven days the OS has seen. And while it is not terribly major, it shows that users have initiated the transition to another operating system.
To which operating system you may ask? Well, Windows 8 usage seems to be down to 7.51 percent from 7.54 percent a week back, while Windows 7 has kept steady its market share at 51.8 percent.
So this means two things — either some users have made the move to Windows 8.1 directly and it is yet to show up in numbers, or some of them are choosing competing platforms like Mac OS X or Linux. A third scenario could be that some have chosen tablets, including ones based on Windows RT.
I guess we should have a better idea in the next couple of months.
All Comments
Chromebooks were not mentioned. They are slowly getting more and more market share. Enough for Microsoft to be scared enough to make the latest Scroogled ad directed at them. After watching the disgusting ad, I hope Chromebooks take a bigger piece of the pie than ever.
Yeah, they are somewhat of a hit in the education sector, from what I have been hearing. And not to mention, plenty of new models have been released, really affordable models.
I think you drooled on the page!
I have yet to see any of my friends using a chromebook. So far, it is 0.
By the end of the holiday season in early 2014, we will see that there are significant number of people on 8.1. Numbers fluctuate from week to week, so we can’t get a real comparison comparing numbers a couple weeks from each other. Do you really think people are moving to Linux in large numbers? The people who actually know what Linux is probably make up about as many people as have 8 and Vista. By this time next year we’re probably looking at 8.x have double the share it has now or more. Windows Phone, tablets, and X-box are all products that will gain in popularity over the next year. They will add to people being comfortable with a Metro interface
Win 8.1 here