You may remember that a month ago, we reported that the worldwide market share for Windows XP-based PCs actually went up slightly in January 2012. There was no explanation as to why a 10 year old operating system would actually gain users after such a long time.
Now things seem to be getting back to normal. The newest PC operating system report from Net Applications claims that while Windows XP is still the worldwide leader, its percentage has gone back down to 45.39 percent, compared to January"s 47.19 percent.
Microsoft"s latest OS, Windows 7, gained some market share in January. The report claims that Windows 7 is now used by 38.12 percent of PCs worldwide, up compared to 36.40 percent in January. Windows Vista had 8.10 percent of the PC OS market share in February, followed by Mac OS X 10.6 at 3 percent, Mac OS X 10.7 at 2.69 and "other" operating systems at 2.70 percent.
Of course, Microsoft has just released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview which means it will be installed on a large number of PCs in the next month. On April 1, we should see how much of the operating system market share will be taken up by Windows 8.