Windows 8.1 Finally Passes Windows 8 In Market Share 187
An anonymous reader writes "May was the seventh full month of availability for Microsoft's latest operating system version: Windows 8.1 continues to grow slowly while Windows 8 remains largely flat, allowing the former to finally pass the latter in market share. At the same time, Windows 7 has managed to climb back over the 50 percent mark, while Windows XP still has more than 25 percent of the pie, despite support for the ancient OS finally ending in April."
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:12.64 percent in only 17 months (Score:5, Informative)
Three years used to be a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm -- back in the 90s and early 2000s -- but the average consumer no longer upgrades their computer nearly that often. Most of my friends are still using 5-7 year old hardware, because the hardware from that era is still perfectly capable of running today's software. Your techie friends may upgrade every three years, but nobody else does.
The vast majority of consumers only upgrade their OS when they buy a new system. The lack of uptake of Windows 8 is simply because not that many people have replaced their computer in the last few years. Unfortunately, a lot of the hardware from the 2004-2005 era (the first generation of systems to take DDR2 RAM) is still floating around. Because these systems shipped with XP, they are still running XP, and we now have a problem on our hands.
Compare the Windows 8 growth curve to XP? That 9-year-old hardware from 2005 is still perfectly adequate for most tasks. On the other hand, using a PC from 1992 when XP came out in 2001 would have been impossible (unless you were rich, that computer would have had a 386 CPU and a hard drive with less than 100MB!)
Re:12.64 percent in only 17 months (Score:5, Informative)
You mean 40% of servers, 96% of supercomputers, and 80% of smartphones/tablets?
Linux may have started out as a desktop OS, but now it's very much a server/enterprise/workstation (am I allowed to use that word anymore?) OS. Oh, and also embedded devices and phones (really, everything except the desktop). Turns out, the average person who buys a PC is going to use the OS the computer ships with and will never upgrade.
Re:12.64 percent in only 17 months (Score:4, Informative)
People have nearly always put their damned fingers on the screen when they wanted things to happen.
Since when? I've never seen anyone put their damned fingers on a PC screen and expect it to do something.
A mouse (and especially a touchpad) -- that's a crappy interface device for a civilization that can't manufacture good touch devices and program good touch software.
About the only things a touchsceen is better at than a keyboard and mouse are finger painting, or clicking huge icons in a fast food store. For anything that requires any kind of precision, a touchscreen is an appallingly bad interface.
Re:12.64 percent in only 17 months (Score:4, Informative)
Please explain then, how the (according to slashdot, idiot) non-technical Mac userbase has a 51% uptake of Mavericks inside of 12 months? No, it doesn't automatically deploy, and no, 51% of the Mac userbase is not on 12 month old hardware. I'll offer a hypothesis: Mavericks offers things end Mac end-users want. Windows 8 does not offers things Windows users want.
The explanation is that Mavericks is a free upgrade, while Windows 8 is not. A correct analogy with Mavericks would be that the free Window 8.1 update has passed 50% within 3 months of release.