Monday 3 February 2014

Windows XP market share grows in January

Microsoft Windows XP screen
Use of the ageing Windows XP platform grew in January, despite the cut-off date for the operating system being just two months away.
Microsoft will end support for XP on 8 April, but despite repeated attempts by the company to urge migrations away from the platform, the latest data from Netmarketshare.com shows use actually rose in the past month.
Data from January showed that 29.23 percent of machines tracked were using the 13-year-old platform, up slightly from a figure of 28.98 percent in December 2013.
The figure will no doubt be greeted with frustration from Microsoft, which has tried warning customers that remaining on XP could cause major security issues. It has already extended its Security Essentials support for XP by one year to help firms migrate securely.
But many appear unwilling to move, and numerous V3 readers have declared that they have no intention of migrating to a newer operating system, citing XP’s numerous benefits over other Windows alternatives.
“For individual users, the idea of switching away from XP is a non-starter: with so many application programs running on XP and not Windows 7 or above, why switch?” one reader wrote in 2013 as the six-month deadline passed.
The NetMarketShare data showed that use of Windows 8.1 is still only at 3.95 percent of the market, although this is up from December 2013 when it was 3.6 percent. The growth in Windows 8.1 was matched by a slight decline in Windows 8 from 6.89 to 6.63 percent between December and January.
Windows 7 remains the most popular operating system in use, with 47.49 percent of the market.

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