Windows 8 Passes Vista, Hits 5.1% Market Share

An anonymous reader writes "With the first half of 2013 now over, Windows 8 continues to grow its share steadily but slowly, while Windows XP and Vista decline. In fact, Windows 8 has now passed the 5 percent mark, as well as surpassed the market share of its predecessor's predecessor, Windows Vista. The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that June 2013 was an impressive one for Windows 8, which gained 0.83 percentage points (from 4.27 percent to 5.10 percent) while Windows 7 fell 0.48 percentage points (from 44.85 percent to 44.37 percent)."

Comments

Surpassing Vista

[vikingpower]

Not that much of an achievement. If that is all they can announce... Sounds to me like the German Army bulletins toward the end of 2nd World War.

Re:Surpassing Vista

[dingen]

And mind you: it's not passing Vista's market share as it was in October 2007 (equally 10 months after launch as Windows 8 is now). It's just passed Vista's *current* market share.

No consumer-oriented version of Windows has ever seen such a slow adoption as Windows 8 is showing now.

Re:Surpassing Vista

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

How long do you suppose Microsoft can hold out until Windows 9?

More to the point, how long do you suppose WE the users can hold out until Windows 9?

I dread the day my Win 7 machines die because I'll have to replace them with those blasted Win 8 machines. I'd much rather stretch my existing machines' life until Microsoft gets its act together and I can safely skip the Win 8 experience. Exactly the same way I went straight from XP to Win 7 and avoided Vista.

Re:Surpassing Vista

[wvmarle]

What may be more notable, is the staying power of Win XP.

Win XP is with 37% market share not far behind the 44% of Win 7 (two major versions ahead of XP, and released almost four years ago by now). If all computers that had been replaced would have received Win 7, the market share of Win 7 compared to Win XP should be much higher: if the average lifetime of a PC is five years, some 80% of the computers that were in use back in summer 2009 have been replaced by now. Yet newer-than-XP versions of Windows are far behind that number.

And while it's market share is falling, it's falling only slowly, with a 0.5% loss over the past month. And I really can not imagine just 0.5% of computers are being replaced in a month - at an average lifespan of 5 years for a PC there should be nearly 1.7% replacement rate per month. So is it that XP computers are all just old ones that are not being replaced? Or is it that XP is being installed on new computers? Both are about as unbelievable, yet I can't think of another reason XP's market share is falling so much slower than the computer replacement rate.

Re: Surpassing Vista

[Pino Grigio]

Only corporations, small business, medium sized business, large business, government, home users (especially gamers). Apart from these people, it's dying, yes.

Re:So it should

[gigaherz]

Well if you compare it with OSX, iOS and Ubuntu's Unity, metro is not THAT bad. It's when you compare it with a proper desktop environment like Xfce or Windows 7's Aero that Metro is terrible.

Regular users

[Loki_666]

I bet even non-techie users don't like Metro.... for a start, where will they store their documents now? The desktop and the recycle bin were the usual two favourite locations pre Win 8. :P

Re:XP - 37% with less than a year of support

[Teun]

12 y/o? Yes the name XP might be but over the years the various service packs changed it dramatically.

I would count the age of up to date XP installs from the issue date of SP3, early May 2008.

Re:So it should

[Bob the Super Hamste]

You are forgetting users like my step mother who can't figure out why her new laptop acts like someone's phone instead like her computer at work. If she wanted something that acted like a smart phone she would have bought a smart phone.