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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
It's not supposed to be funny. Windows 8 is broken, and consumers have been very vocal about that.
It's interesting that while 8.1 is around 10%-ish, 8 is still about 5%. Considering 8.1 is a free update for registered copies of 8, how many of the un-updated copies of 8 are pirated versions?
What would be the point of pirating Windows 8?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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)
bring back borg gates
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels. It regularly disables my wireless card so that it can reset it and verify my connection by reestablishing the link with Microsoft's privacy-invading servers. Windows 8.1 has a kind of crash I've never seen in any Windows version until this one: memory management. As in, with Windows 8.1 Microsoft has actually failed to correctly produce a functioning, reliable core operating system component.
I rarely talk bad about Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 because it's nigh on impossible to lament its failures without people popping out of the woodwork to detract from conversation. I bet this post will be marked "troll", but I'm not pretending, I'm not trying to elicit a negative emotional response, I don't want to start an argument, and I'm not just bashing Microsoft. MS has done many great things as well, since Windows 8 was released. Accessibility to assistance in learning Windows programming is better than ever before, as one example, and their support and development communities have grown in quality by leaps and bounds.
Now let's mention the one and only discussion we've seen about Windows 10 having a keylogger embedded in it while overlooking that random forum posters have said that it's because the OS is in beta but Microsoft has never confirmed that the keylogger would be removed.
Windows 7 is still the best operating system for consumers. Linux suffers from inaccessibility to software, though steps are being taken to correct that now. Apple OS represents a culture and not a technical solution. Windows still reigns as king, but Windows 8 and onward thus far remain to potentially dethrone it.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels.
Gosh...if you search for something, and it looks on the web, it gets sent to the web search engine. Those bastards.
Oh wait... well, suppose you don't WANT it to search the web, just the local computer? And Microsoft forces every search to go the web? Those bastards!
Oh wait... you can turn that 'feature' off? Let me guess -- its a registry hack or some obscure command line thing right? Its actually simpler to block them at the DNS, router, and hosts level... Those bastards.
Oh wait... its a simple gui accessible option in search. The section is called "Use Bing to search online" and the option is called "Get search suggestions and web results from Bing", and its a simple on or off.
Well... other operating systems don't pull this shit... uhoh... OSX Spotlight has this option too? And Ubuntu does too?
Overreact much? Did you even think to look whether you could simply turn it off before you ran to your firewall configuration in your router?
Gnome3 is almost as bad as Win8!
Sorry, best I can do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Honestly, I sometimes think the Gnome team must have paid Microsoft to release Window 8, just so they could point at a UI that's worse than theirs.
The appeal of the Chromebook is what, exactly?
It doesn't run Window 8.
Mac didn't win the "desktop Unix" battle. It won the non-Windows desktop manager battle. It's not really a Unix desktop, it just sits on top of a Unix subsystem, much like how Android sits on top of Linux. The only difference is that it more of the userland apps, which are rarely ever used by anyone who isn't a developer. But it doesn't adhere to a Unix philosophy at the high level, so it's not a proper Unix desktop. Try running Unix apps, and it has to start a proper Unix desktop to do so.
i would rather deal with unsupported XP with viruses than the steaming dog turd called windows 8. it was the most infuriating UI I have ever had the displeasure of using, and I lived through the rise and fall of macromedia flash websites
Snowden and Manning are heroes.