Windows 8 Passes Vista, Hits 5.1% Market Share

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Windows 8 Passes Vista, Hits 5.1% Market Share

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 30, 2013 @09:02PM from the we-can-finally-sleep-nights-again dept.

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)."

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Surpassing Vista by vikingpower · 2013-06-30 21:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:Surpassing Vista by dingen · 2013-06-30 21:10 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
2. Re:Surpassing Vista by RogueyWon · 2013-06-30 21:23 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  How did the takeup of ME compare? That was billed as the "consumer oriented" OS at the time (while 2000 was billed as the "business product").
  If we're at the kind of point where comparisons to ME feel appropriate, then Win8 really is in trouble. At least with ME, there was always a strong sense that it was never intended as much more than a short-term stopgap. Win8, on the other hand, has been pushed very hard as "the future".
3. Re:Surpassing Vista by lxs · 2013-06-30 21:35 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Windows 9? You think MS can go three full Windows releases without changing the naming scheme? That hasn't happened since Windows 1,2 and 3.
4. Re:Surpassing Vista by Trepidity · 2013-06-30 21:37 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I'm waiting for them to put out a press release when they hit 5x Linux market share.
  
  --
  10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
5. Re:Surpassing Vista by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · 2013-06-30 21:45 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
6. Re:Surpassing Vista by gl4ss · 2013-06-30 21:54 · Score: 3
  
  How did the takeup of ME compare? That was billed as the "consumer oriented" OS at the time (while 2000 was billed as the "business product").
  If we're at the kind of point where comparisons to ME feel appropriate, then Win8 really is in trouble. At least with ME, there was always a strong sense that it was never intended as much more than a short-term stopgap. Win8, on the other hand, has been pushed very hard as "the future".
  me might have done comparatively well. pc sales were in a huge upswing back in those days.
  
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  world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
7. Re:Surpassing Vista by wvmarle · 2013-06-30 21:54 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
8. Re:Surpassing Vista by dingen · 2013-06-30 22:02 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Probably both. People are holding on to a machine that works because of the economic situation and a lot of people still prefer XP to anything else and install it on brand new systems. I guess it will be until 2014 when support is dropped that the numbers will show some real drops, although it will be mainly from businesses as they are the ones who care about support in the first place. I doubt home users will think a lack of updates is a bad thing.
  
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  Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
9. Re:Surpassing Vista by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-30 22:05 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  > 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.
  Both. Some corporate images are still based on XP, and XP compatibility is required when purchasing new hardware. I know this is unbelievable, but there was a similar situation with NT4.0, which was used way post the point where it was still indicated (especially given that Windows 2000 was actually quite good, but unfortunately incompatible in quite a few areas).
  And some companies got ride of automatic PC replacement. I know colleagues that work on a 5 or 6 year old PC. Actually for light office use that would not really be an issue, but for engineering it is a bit of a drag. Companies are pursuing all potential cost savings in the current economic climate.
10. Re: Surpassing Vista by Pino+Grigio · 2013-06-30 22:49 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Only corporations, small business, medium sized business, large business, government, home users (especially gamers). Apart from these people, it's dying, yes.
11. Re:Surpassing Vista by KingMotley · 2013-06-30 23:21 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Or it could be that the statistics are being pulled from sources that have unusually slow adoption rate. I typically check the statistics that I see come from netmarketshare and the like from a couple other sources, and I've always noticed that they lag considerably from both another source, and my own statistics from visitors from my client's web sites.
  For example, my statistics show 6.6% for Windows 8 , 7.88% for Vista, 30.28% for XP, and 54.69% for Windows 7.
  netmarketshare shows 5.1% for Windows 8, 4.62% for Vista, 37.17% for XP, and 44.37% for Windows 7.
  My other source shows 12.7% for Windows 8, 7.2% for Vista, 7.9% for XP, and 66% for Windows 7.
  There is quite a bit of difference between the three, but ntmarketshare typically seems to poll from placed that hang on to their systems longer than most, I'm guessing some very large businesses as their primary source, which skews their numbers.
12. Re: Surpassing Vista by roarkarchitect · 2013-06-30 23:55 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  We are an XP shop except for the engineering work stations which are windows 7 - I can't see us going to windows 8 every, our legacy CRM and MRP systems will not work. We still use a Windows 2000 domain- which we are virtualizing. and my workstationis Vista :(
13. Re:Surpassing Vista by Joce640k · 2013-06-30 23:57 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  I've got lots of perfectly good hardware (scanners, printers...etc) that never received a Windows 7 driver. I have to keep at least one XP machine around just for that reason.
  
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  No sig today...
14. Re:Surpassing Vista by AmiMoJo · 2013-07-01 00:02 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  No consumer-oriented version of Windows has ever seen such a slow adoption as Windows 8 is showing now.
  That's a worthless measure of success for Windows. 99.9% of copies are sold on new PCs or as part of bulk licences in businesses. The former is no indication of Windows 8 acceptance, merely of new PC sales. The latter is no indication of Windows 8 acceptance, merely IT spending and the amount of lag between release and companies rolling out new operating systems.
  Conversely because almost 100% of Windows 7 users installed SP1 that doesn't mean SP1 was a huge success, merely that it was put forwards as a critical update and people had no reason to reject it.
  
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15. Re:Surpassing Vista by ArcherB · 2013-07-01 00:10 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I've got lots of perfectly good hardware (scanners, printers...etc) that never received a Windows 7 driver. I have to keep at least one XP machine around just for that reason.
  My nephew is staying at my place for the summer and brought an old Vista machine. Rather than run a network cable to his room, I gave him a USB wireless-N adapter. He tried for a couple of weeks to make it work while a cat-5 cable ran across my office floor into his room. The other day, he decided to install Linux on the system after using my machine every time his crashed. We downloaded Mint and installed it. Once it was up and running, I plugged in the USB adapter, unplugged the network cable, punched in my wifi password and BAM! He was on the network and reading reddit. (I guess reddit is what kids do these days).
  Anyway, the point is that all the drivers you may need are probably included in some of the latest Linux distro's out there. You might want to try booting off a live CD and try it out. If you're not a gamer, I see no reason to be stuck running XP or any other Windows based system.
  
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16. Re:Surpassing Vista by dingen · 2013-07-01 00:19 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Yeah, that's why I'm still using my iMac from 2007. It's got a fairly fast Core 2 Duo chip and 6 GB RAM and basically the only thing I need is a browser and text editor. A newer/faster machine is simply not worth the investment.
  
  --
  Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
17. Re:Surpassing Vista by nanoflower · 2013-07-01 00:28 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I bet many of those same people in the industry said that PC sales were down before Windows 8 was released because people were waiting for Win8 to be released. People in the industry can be wrong just about as often as the average Slashdot reader when it comes to why sales are down. Everything from the economy, to having PCs that are good enough there's no need to upgrade. to not liking Win8 (or the comments people have made about it without having seen it/tried it) play a part. Which one is the most important is unknown. My own guess would be a combination of the economy and current PCs being good enough but it's just a guess. I've industry analysts say one thing about where things are heading and why. Then a few months later they completely change their story. Which just shows that without some clear indicator of why things are happening they have to guess. It may be an educated guess, but it's still a guess.
18. Re:Surpassing Vista by nukenerd · 2013-07-01 00:35 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  How did the takeup of ME compare? That was billed as the "consumer oriented" OS at the time ...... At least with ME, there was always a strong sense that it was never intended as much more than a short-term stopgap.
  As I recall in those days, queues of people camped on PCWorld's doorstep for a few days before each new Windows release (like they do for Apple stuff today).
  
  I do not recall ME being regarded as a stopgap. The name "ME" even suggested it was forward looking. True, those who knew better recognised it as W95 on a Zimmerframe - one last fling by MS to extract money from the consumer market with a pointless upgrade. I never ran ME, but understand that it was actually worse than 98.
  
  Also, there was no gap to stop. Windows NT was already available and had been runnable on entry-level PCs' for some time (and did, in the form of XP just a year later). It was games compatibility that kept the crappy 95/98/ME bloodline going, but MS needed to tell the games writers to port their stuff to NT/XP sooner or later; and they should have done it sooner.
19. Re:Surpassing Vista by RogueyWon · 2013-07-01 00:52 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  From the gamer's point of view, the problem with NT was its complete lack of directx functionality. This was addressed by 2k. But games developers could hardly be blamed for focussing on Win98 when MS's own tools for gaming weren't there on NT. Uptake of 2k was slower than it could have been, primarily due to third party driver issues that caused stability and performance issues for many games. That one's perhaps slightly harder to pin on MS.
  I followed what is, I think, a very typical path for gamers at the time. I hung on to 98 until 2k service pack 2 was released, at which point most of the problems related to gaming under 2k had been addressed. I never made a conscious decision to move to XP, but a couple of years later, when I bought a new PC that came with it installed, there was no reason to move back to 2k.
20. Re: Surpassing Vista by AJH16 · 2013-07-01 01:16 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Let me know how writing code or actual real letters goes on your smartphone or tablet. The desktop market isn't going away, it just won't move as many machines (since they last longer now).
  
  --
  AJ Henderson
21. Re:Surpassing Vista by arth1 · 2013-07-01 01:26 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I never ran ME, but understand that it was actually worse than 98.
  
  No, I don't think it was worse, I just think it was rushed.
  Me deprecated many of the VxD drivers used with Windows 98, and needed updated WDM drivers that didn't require real mode. Also, it came with generic USB drivers, and USB was just becoming widely popular, but with lots of "almost-compatible" devices on the market, requiring special drivers. The manufacturers weren't ready, and the result was highly unstable Me systems, especially when using USB or older hardware.
  But they felt they HAD to rush it - Windows 2000 was coming.
  Windows 2000 really was the solution, but Microsoft did the big mistake of not marketing it towards consumers. Then XP came, which basically was a dumbed down 2000 with updated graphics, and it took the world with storm. But boy, was it buggy before SP1. Anyone sane would run 2000 instead.
22. Re:Surpassing Vista by RogueyWon · 2013-07-01 03:15 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Thing is, while the driver situation back then may have been better for Linux than Win2k, the simple fact was that you couldn't actually play most games on Linux.
  Thinking back to the games I was mostly playing back in my final days as a Win98 user, when I was weighing up a shift to Win2k, I can recall a good few (as a postgrad student at the time, I had a lot more time for gaming than I had now). I was heavily into the online scene for Counter-Strike (was the head admin of a major UK league) and also fairly heavily into online Warcraft 3. I was also a more casual online player of Battlefield 1942 and Tribes 2. Offline, I spent a lot of time with the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series. Playing that lot on Linux? Very, very unlikely.
  So it was a case of sticking with Win98, tolerating the requirement for reboots pretty much daily if you wanted to preserve performance and stability, and waiting for reports that 2k was actually usable.
23. Re:Surpassing Vista by LoRdTAW · 2013-07-01 04:41 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  "That's when I started looking at Linux more seriously, especially after the clusterfuck of the 98-XP upgrade. It disabled my CD burning software saying it made the system unstable, despite the fact that I'd not had stability problems with 98, and would not ley me uninstall it.
  This is why you never upgrade windows. You always do a fresh install. Yea its annoying to lose configurations and installed software but its not like it was difficult to get back up to speed, maybe a week at most. I learned after a 98-2k install that hard crashed (no bsod just locked up) after upgrade and wouldn't boot. From then on installing a new windows OS ment starting fresh which always worked flawlessly. And with windows we all know it better to start fresh.
  Back in the days of 2k/XP changing a motherboard which had a different chipset ment endless headaches. You had to be sure you uninstalled all of your hardware drivers then shut down and installed the new mobo. Then boot up and pray the brain dead windows kernel would see the changes and try a default IDE/ATA driver instead of BSOD. Going from a single core/non-HT CPU to a dual CPU or HT CPU? Then you had to fuck around with the HAL to get a multiprocessor HAL working (back when moving from P3 -> p4/xeon). windows 7 was much better and could handle a hardware swap, so could Vista, amazingly.
  Linux has always worked flawlessly and is always superior to windows when it comes to driver and hardware. You could yank a hard drive with Linux installed from an Intel PC and install it into an AMD PC with COMPLETELY different hardware and it would happily boot. Though, back in the days of ISA cards things weren't that easy. But it never was except for maybe DOS when you assigned memory ranges, IRQ's and DMA's by hand and you knew your limits.
  Nowadays I only use Windows 7 on a PC for gaming and general use. Everything else is Linux, even my laptop. I don't hate windows, I just don't need it to do everything I want/need to do. And some things windows simply can't do without hacks or third party software which may or may not work (eg. SSHFS).
24. Re: Surpassing Vista by AJH16 · 2013-07-01 04:54 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That's testing rather than writing code and a Surface Pro isn't really a tablet, it's a laptop pretending to be a tablet. It has an actual full fledged OS on it and runs x86. You could also accomplish the same with a touch screen monitor on a much more powerful desktop that would build faster and give more area to work on your code in. Don't get me wrong, not saying tablets don't have their uses, but they are substandard for many, many activities.
  
  --
  AJ Henderson
25. Re: Surpassing Vista by hairyfeet · 2013-07-01 10:26 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Sorry I have to throw a flag, bullshit on the field. One of the reasons I advised my customers against Windows 8 is how many programs i found that run fine on 7, crap themselves on 8. some of it was hardware like drivers not playing nice, some of it was software, it ended up just a mess.
  That is why I hate posts that say "Oh its just 7 with Metro" because no, its really not. since i'm not on the dev team i can only guess and say that all that mobile and tweeting twits for shits changed too much of the background, all I know is that its less stable, has more stupid "senior moments", almost as bad as vista in that regard, and while the Win 7 units have been running since RTM I've had to do multiple "refresh my PC" jobs for customers which I still think that tech was added to cover for a corruption bug they couldn't nail down.
  I do have to say how much I find the irony moist and delicious on how many "keyboard commanders" try to cover for the OS...which was DESIGNED FOR TABLETS and therefor in its natural state doesn't HAVE a keyboard for the commanders to try to cover up for its failings! IMHO if your OS requires you to memorize commands like its fricking 1989? You have failed at OS design and should be ashamed. This guy says it better than I can but one thing I agree on, if you need a Win 7 PC to google how to use the Win 8 PC? Its a fail of epic proportions.
  
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So it should by Ice+Tiger · 2013-06-30 21:08 · Score: 5, Funny

It's the best OS MS have produced in my opinion, runs well and like the UI and yes I'm running a desktop computer! I use OSX, iOS, Ubuntu and Windows so maybe am used to switching UIs so learning Metro was no big deal compared to someone who has only seen the Start button all their computer life.

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1. Re:So it should by gigaherz · 2013-06-30 21:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:So it should by somersault · 2013-06-30 21:29 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  If it was really a "new paradigm", ie the whole OS was built around it, it would actually be fine. The problem is that Metro feels more like a hacked on 3rd party replacement for the Start Menu, than something that works well with the Windows desktop.
  
  --
  which is totally what she said
3. Re:So it should by JaredOfEuropa · 2013-06-30 21:34 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I have to agree: it runs well. Booting is exceptionally fast; in Windows 8 I'll be running on the desktop while my older (but more powerful) machine is still loading the Windows 7 login screen. I dislike Metro though; I suppose I could make it into something usable, if I spend the effort to nicely organize my favorite apps on the Metro canvas, but why should I? The old Windows start menu does that for me in a very usable way with zero effort (other than installing the tool to bring back that start menu). Besides that, I like to use the desktop like my real desktop, to organize and sort files I am working on. The Metro canvas is useless for that.
  
  A real problem with Metro is that so many basic actions are hidden or counter-intuitive. You're doing something wrong if people have to search for help on how to close an app or manage windows on your OS. And before they can even try and search for that info, they have to use another computer to search for help on getting the damn address bar to appear in IE! People's hatred for Metro doesn't just come from having to learn a new UI, a lot of it is due to (piss-)poor design.
  
  --
  If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
4. Re:So it should by Unkl_Shvelven · 2013-06-30 22:31 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The reason why Windows 8 boots so fast is that it doesn't actually boot. When you "Shut Down" from the charms bar, it actually just kills your user session and hibernates. You can turn off fastboot and see for yourself.
  
  --
  regular man whom love computer (Also, fuck beta).
5. Re:So it should by Yaotzin · 2013-06-30 23:34 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  It works just like the start menu, only bigger. You use just like you would the regular start menu, type whatever you want to run and press enter. Don't see how this can be such a huge gripe. I haven't switched to Win8 yet but from what little I've used it, I couldn't find much of a problem with it apart from poor network drivers.
  
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  Error: No error occurred
6. Re:So it should by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · 2013-07-01 01:35 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  Time to offend someone
7. Re:So it should by gnasher719 · 2013-07-01 01:45 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  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.
  Years ago my daughter bought a laptop which came with the then brand new Windows Vista. She called me and asked if I could put Windows on it for her...
Huh by Ignacio · 2013-06-30 21:18 · Score: 4, Funny

I guess cramming it down people's throats really *is* an effective way to gain marketshare...
XP - 37% with less than a year of support by blarkon · 2013-06-30 21:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

The real news here is that an OS that has less than a year of support left is at around 37% market share. XP is falling at about 1% per month - but will still be a substantial part of the market (probably at least 25%) when Microsoft stops releasing software updates.
1. Re:XP - 37% with less than a year of support by dingen · 2013-06-30 21:30 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  A lack of support might push a few businesses to adopt a newer version of Windows, but I doubt people at home will care. Actually, a lack of updates might be seen as a feature (no reboots!) by those who are still holding on to a 12+ year old operating system.
  
  --
  Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
2. Re:XP - 37% with less than a year of support by Teun · 2013-06-30 23:19 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
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Re:Still sucks by sosume · 2013-06-30 21:36 · Score: 5, Funny

You forgot to write Microsoft with a '$' .. you heretic.
Regular users by Loki_666 · 2013-06-30 22:13 · Score: 4, Insightful

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