Every month NetMarketShare releases usage share figures for all of the major operating systems. In the past these figures tended to paint an interesting picture of how well -- or rather how badly -- Microsoft’s newest operating system was doing. Occasionally the OS grew share, occasionally it lost share -- sometimes quite dramatically.
Now though, the only picture that’s being painted by these monthly figures is an operating system that has no future and will vanish quietly, and with zero fanfare, once Windows 10 arrives.
Windows 8 had a paltry 3.52 percent usage share in March, and dropped 0.02 percentage points to 3.50 percent in April. Windows 8.1 was on 10.55 percent in March, and grew to 11.16 percent a month later. In total the combined Windows 8.x managed to grow just 0.50 percentage points to sit on 14.66 percent. The tiled OS remains behind XP which, against all odds, still has 15.93 percent share.
As ever, Windows 7 remains the clear champion, with 58.39 percent usage share, rising 0.35 percentage points from March to April.
The clear takeaway from another unexciting month is no one is swapping operating systems at the moment, and that makes sense with Windows 10 set to arrive in a matter of months (on PCs at least).
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