It goes without saying that moving the rather large Windows XP user base away from the ancient operating system is pretty much Microsoft’s biggest challenge as of right now.
The vintage operating system is set to for official retirement on April 8, 2014 — Microsoft will stop providing security patches and updates to the general public after this date.
And the software titan (along with its partners) continues persuading users and businesses that are still running the decade old operating system to upgrade to a newer version of Windows, be it Windows 7 or the modern Windows 8.
Now it seems that users have started to listen.
Data provided by Net Applications for the month of August 2013 shows that users are finally getting Microsoft’s message, and the old platform is losing ground — in a hurry.
The latest statistics from the market researcher show that, at this point, Windows XP is still powering around 33.66 percent of computers the world over. But this is down almost 4 percent versus the month before, meaning it is as significant a drop as any.
And while for some this difference may seem a bit paltry, it is actually the biggest drop in market share that Windows XP has recorded in the past 12 months. For a platform that usually dropped a few percentage points in a given month, this is huge.
In fact, back in October 2012, Windows XP had a market share of 40.66 percent, which gradually declined to 37.19 percent in July 2013.
When taken in this context, this is a massive drop in worldwide market share. But the operating system will have to continue to lose users at this pace so that Microsoft can get closer to its goal of seeing the market share drop to less than 10 percent range.
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I’m part of these statics. I just upgraded three older company XP laptops this past month. Two upgraded to Win 7 and when Microsoft started running a $120 deal of selling Win 8 including installation, I converted the last one to Win 8. I discovered myself that Win 8 on a non-touch screen is actually not as bad as I originally thought. Now that I’m experiencing it, I wish I would have converted all of them to Win 8. Of course Dell said Win 7 or 8 wouldn’t be supported on my laptop (basically telling me I was stuck with XP). But the Microsoft store (who installed all three but I had to purchase Win 7 elsewhere online) said they would work since I increased the RAM. Now I have given new life to 3 older laptops. I love that Microsoft store. They don’t work on commission so you get fair, truthful and plain talk answers.