Sunday, June 22, 2014

Windows 8 Crosses Some Important Milestones

Windows 8 is the latest operating system from Microsoft, and it has not been doing that well in the market so far. According to the latest market survey figures, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 together take up only about 14% of the Windows market share.

How the Windows operating systems stacks up in the market?

Windows 7 is still the market leader among all the Windows OS versions. It still maintains more than 50% of the market share for the Microsoft operating systems. What is surprising is the 25% share Windows XP still enjoys. Microsoft expected to see some significant drop in the Windows XP user base, as they stopped support for the 13 year old operating system.

But, the completely outdated operating system is still widely used, mainly because of its minimal system requirements. As already mentioned, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 together holds about 14% of the market. All the other Windows OS versions including Windows Vista get about 8%. This means that even if you put together the market shares for Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows Vista, it will not surpass the popularity enjoyed by Windows XP at the moment.

Microsoft did reach an important Windows 8 milestone

But, Microsoft is closely watching the Windows 8 sales and in the past few months, it did cross the very important Windows 8 milestone of 200 million units. When you are looking at the market share alone, you see that the Windows 8 just about managed to get to the two-digit mark at 14%. But, the actual number of Windows OS users this figure represents is in hundreds of millions.

This is because Windows operating systems take up a big chunk of the desktop PC market, close to 90%. The Mac and Linux operating systems take up the remaining 10%. Of course, it is entirely a different picture, if you are looking at the smartphone and tablet operating system markets. There, Android takes the lead followed by iOS and Windows 8 operating system.

Yet, another Windows 8 milestone for Microsoft is the number of apps available at their Windows Store. Windows Store crossed the 100,000 apps mark last year, and currently has 142,000 apps available. The Windows 8 users now have plenty of cool apps to choose from.

So, the 14% market share is not all that bad, if it keeps growing slowly and steadily over the next few months. Let us hope that it does.

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