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Windows 8 and 8.1 Pass 15% Market Share, Windows XP Drops Below 20% Mark
An anonymous reader writes Everyone is well-aware by now that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have not seen the impressive adoption rate of their predecessor. Yet the duo had a particularly good run last month, finally passing 15 percent market share together. Together, they owned 16.80 percent of the market at the end of October, up from 12.26 percent at the end of September. Windows XP meanwhile dropped a whopping 6.69 points to 17.18 percent. The biggest catalyst for these changes was most likely back to school sales in September, which are better reflected in the data after students use their new machines for a full month.
FTA: "These gains did not come at the expense of Windows 7, which still managed to grow 0.34 points to 53.05 percent."
s/©//g
8.1 is not an automatic update. It requires launching the store, accepting the update and waiting for the lengthy download and install process to finish. I have seen plenty of Windows 8 PC's that nobody bothered to upgrade. Not a single person I have talked to still running 8.0 was even aware of the upgrade. It's not like they made a conscious choice to stick with 8.0, they simply didn't bother to even find out. Microsoft would have to make a greater effort to force them to upgrade through automatic update and continuous prompts that keep requesting permission to download and upgrade when they boot up to get this to change.
That's pretty much the one and only reason why most of these users have not upgraded on their own. 95% of those windows 8.0 users are simply not clued in to the fact an upgrade should be done. 4% likely had problems getting the upgrade to install or download so just stick with 8.0 rather than troubleshoot the issue. Lets peg 1% or less are those choosing to stick with 8.0 (good enough for them, corporate standard, too much trouble, not enough bandwidth to download, etc etc)
Based on past experience, most of those Windows 8 and 8.1 purchases are home and student based. Businesses are either exercising their Windows 8 downgrade rights and sticking with Windows 7 Pro, or holding out for a true successor, possibly being Windows 10.
Life is not for the lazy.
I thought linux is like 20%. One percent is sort of like "other" in my book.
Linux's market share in desktop PCs is pretty much a rounding error. Always has been and that isn't likely to change soon. You'll find plenty of linux in mobile and servers but not in desktop or laptop PCs.
Mac OS X offers a BSD console and support for X11 apps. Native Mac OS X apps have direct access to *nix APIs and it is quite normal and effortless to use them.
You contradict yourself regarding Unix philosophy. In Unix philosophy users often string together those userland apps together to accomplish some task.
You grossly misrepresent Android. Android is not based on Linux, it is hosted on Linux. Android is more of its own operating system. Android users can not access Linux. Android developers do not normally see or even have access to Linux. While an Android developer can get around this and access Linux via the NDK, its a somewhat unnatural thing to do and brings about compatibility issues.