Windows 8 finally comes of age as XP’s market share (possibly) takes precipitous plunge
Windows 8 finally comes of age as XP’s market share (possibly) takes precipitous plunge
Out of nowhere, it seems Windows 8 has finally come of age, with a huge bump of 4.5% in the global desktop operating system market share. Prior to October, the growth of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 was basically flat, edging forward some months and then slipping slightly back — and then boom, October hits, and now the combined market share for Windows 8 and 8.1 is a not-too-shabby 16.8%. This gain seems to have come at the expense of Windows XP, which, following its official retirement in April, finally registered its first big loss of market share (6.7%). In case you were wondering, this means Windows 8/8.1 is now officially more successful than Vista, which is usually the yardstick for bad or failed Windows OSes.
If you take a look at the graph below, which shows desktop operating system trends since December 2013, you’ll see just how remarkable this spike in Windows 8 adoption is.
Basically, prior to October 2014, Windows 7 had been steadily gaining share as Windows XP declined. You can’t see it very clearly, but Windows 8/8.1 has been slowly growing by about half a percentage point every month, with some months flat or declining slightly. This is why we have written a number of stories over the past couple of years about the failure of Windows 8 — and also, presumably, why Microsoft is going back to basics with Windows 10’s focus on the mouse-and-keyboard Desktop experience, rather than hammering home Metro.
Read: Windows 8: The disastrous result of Microsoft’s gutless equivocation
And now, out of nowhere, XP has finally started plummeting — and Windows 8/8.1 has come of age. The stats would seem to indicate that people are leaving Windows XP en masse to join the Windows 8.1 revolution — but is that really the whole picture?
First and foremost, the most likely reason for a shift of this magnitude is a change in how Net Applications analyzes its data. Don’t forget that the PC market consists of over a billion active computers; a shift of 4.5% (Windows 8) or 6.7% (Windows XP) is huge, on the order of tens of millions of PCs. If Microsoft had magically sold 40+ million Windows 8 licenses in the month of October, I suspect we’d hear about it.
October does coincide with the back-to-school period, which is usually a busy time for new laptop and PC sales — but again, an increase of 4.5% would have to be a very good month for PC sales. Another option is that enterprises might have finally decided to install Windows 8.1 — but if anything, you’d think that would’ve occurred after XP’s official retirement in April, rather than a few months later in October. Plus, Windows 7 is the business/enterprise operating system of choice at the moment, not Windows 8. (And indeed, you can see Windows 7’s market share is still growing steadily.)
While I don’t doubt that Windows 8/8.1 is growing, and XP is declining, I suspect the magnitude of the shift is smaller than reported. Perhaps Net Applications introduced a new dataset this month that skewed the results, or maybe it’s correcting for some faulty reporting in previous months — but I think it’s highly unlikely that Windows 8 suddenly went from being unpopular in September, to suddenly the Next Big Thing That Everyone Must Try in October.
We should also point out that “Other” operating systems jumped by more than 2% in October, too, which has never happened before — indicating that either October was finally the Month of the Linux Desktop (MOLD), or that something is probably up with Net Applications’ reporting.
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