After the excitement of its Build conference last week, Microsoft’s starting this week off on a high note. A new analyst report says that Windows 8 finally surpassed Vista in market share. Good news for Microsoft, since Windows Vista is largely regarded as the weak link between XP and Windows 7.
According to the report from Net Applications’ NetMarketshare tracker, Microsoft’s lastest OS held a 5.10 percent market share for June 2013 while Vista slipped to 4.6 percent. By comparison, XP had 37.17 percent of the market and Windows 7 had 44.4 percent. This is the first time Windows 8 surpassed Vista, which continues to fall in market share every month. While XP and Windows 7 still control the market, their numbers – especially XP’s – are also diminishing. Consider this: in January 2013, XP was present on 39.5 percent of machines, but now that number has dropped 2.3 percent. Considering Microsoft is desperately trying to wean users off of XP, this is encouraging news.
Net Applications’ NetMarketshare tracker shows Windows 7’s presence in the market is still holding steady, though it declined ever so slightly since January when it had a 44.5 percent share versus June’s 44.4 percent. Though Redmond isn’t aggressively pushing users to abandon Windows 7 just yet – in fact, it’s still possible to buy new systems running the OS – that time will surely come. Hopefully, the company will give Windows 7 users the same generous years of support they gave XP users.
Oddly enough, despite seeing a glowing Apple logo in almost every coffee shop we’ve wandered into, Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) only held 3.1 percent of the market last month.
When it comes to browser use, there’s more good news for Microsoft, according to Net Applications. The NetMarketshare tracker states that Internet Explorer 10 has surpassed IE 9 with 13.5 percent of the market versus 11.7 percent. For starters, the good news here is that the company is apparently convincing users to upgrade their browser in a timely fashion. IE 10 shipped with Windows 8, but it’s also available for Windows 7, which initially shipped with IE 8. Expect to see Internet Explorer 11 entering into the fray soon, too, particularly after the Windows 8.1 update is publicly released.
By comparison, the same report stated that the most recent version of Google’s Chrome browser, Chrome 27, held 13.8 percent of the market, and the most recent version of Firefox, Firefox 21, was used by 12.5 percent of the market. Bear in mind that these numbers do not take into account less recent versions of the browsers.
What OS and browser are you currently using? Do you have plans to upgrade?
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