Microsoft’s Windows 8 launched a few years ago and not long after that, the Redmond based company pushed out a rather large update called Windows 8.1. With Windows 8.1, Microsoft brought back the Start button and made a few other enhancements to the OS that greatly improved the usability of the platform. Further, Microsoft has pushed out an update 1 to the Windows 8.1 platform that further refines the mouse and keyboard experience.
So, for those of you still running Windows 8, there is a large incentive to upgrade to gain these enhancements and based on markethsare, it looks like many users have taken this advice.
Windows 8.1, according to Net Applications, has surpassed the marketshare of Windows 8. As of the time of this post, Windows 8 and 8.1 make up about 12.5% of the market for desktop users, Windows 7 still dominates the other platforms with about 50% of the usage share and XP still makes up about 25% of the market.
The good news for Microsoft is that users are moving away from Windows 8 and towards the 8.1 update 1, the bad news here is that XP, which is no longer a supported platform, accounts for roughly 25% of the Windows user market.
We would expect that the XP usage share should continue to drop but we also know that places like China, seem to have little incentive to move off of the platform. Why is that? Well, XP piracy is rampant in that part of the world and without another ‘free’ version of Windows to move too, the incentive is quite low at this time.
With Microsoft moving quickly at deploying new builds of Windows and Windows 9 expected to arrive in less than a year, Windows 8 may never surpass that of Windows 7.
Source: Net Applications | Via: TNW