Bill Gates is definitely excited about Windows 8, but the rest of the world might not be – compared to Windows 7, Microsoft’s new OS is seeing far lower pre-release usage stats. And that’s a bad sign in itself, since it gives us an idea of how excited users are to get their hands on the new OS.
Alright, so Windows 8 isn’t even out yet – it shouldn’t matter how many people are using it, right? Well, that’s true to an extent, but a whopping 1.64% of Windows users felt like installing a pre-release version of Windows 7 a month before it was released. Compared to that, only about 0.33% of users are running Windows 8; five times less. To put that in perspective, Windows 7 already had as many users as Windows 8 six months before release.
Again, this doesn’t mean that a lot (read: most) of users are necessarily going to skip Windows 8. Tablets, paired with insanely cheap upgrade costs, just might save it. But it’s still a worrying sign, and you can bet that Microsoft is anxiously watching these numbers as the days until release tick away. Then we’ll really see what the world thinks of Windows 8.
Source: Computer World