Monday, September 2, 2013

Windows 8 growing faster than Vista for the first time


Windows 8 reception has certainly not been overwhelming. Now, for the first time, Windows 8 is actually doing better than Windows Vista.

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Ever since Windows 8 was released in October last year, it has had a difficult time to actually sell and has not met the expectations by Microsoft and the analysts. The situation was particularly troublesome as Windows 8 did even worse than the horrible Windows Vista (the biggest mistake as described by Steve Ballmer) which was released in 2007.

Now, user statistics have come in from August and based on the statistics from Net Applications, it appears that Windows 8 may finally starting to gain some moderate traction.


The recent statistics show that the market share of Windows 8 in August grew by 2.5 percentage-units, which so far is the fastest growth rate in market share per month. In total now 10 months after release, Windows 8 has a market share of 8.4% which can be compared to Windows Vista which had a market share of 7.3% 10 months after its release. 

However, even though the numbers may indicate that Windows 8 is gaining market share, the truth is that this is in comparison to one of the worst operating systems as per Microsoft's own definition. When compared with Windows 7 instead, it is apparent that Windows 8 is not even close in terms of market share penetration. For Windows 7, 10 months after its release, it had a market share of 17.3%, which is more than double of what Windows 8 has managed to achieve. 

It does appear that Microsoft can no longer pump out products of bad quality and then enjoy massive sales simply because it is a standard Microsoft product. The market is likely much more picky now, in particular with the excellent alternatives provided by Apple Mac OS X and also to some extent user-friendly Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.


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