Windows 8.x marketshare fell in September

The latest OS marketshare statistics frmo Net Applications reveal a bizarre trend: after months of steady gains, Microsoft's Windows 8.x lost marketshare in September. Windows 8.1 fell from 7.09 percent at the end of August to 6.67 percent at the end of September, while Windows 8 suffered a similar drop from 6.28 percent to 5.59 percent. The total marketshare of Windows 8.x is now just 12.26 percent, 1.11 percent lower than it was a month ago.

Windows 7 on the other hand saw its marketshare go up 1.5 percent month-over-month. Such a large drop for Windows 8.x in just one month seems pretty odd, it makes us wonder if anything changed to the way Net Application calculates operating system marketshare as it's hard to imagine that people are downgrading en masse from Windows 8.x to Windows 7. Given that Windows XP's marketshare remains static it can't be the case that upgrades from older versions of Windows to Windows 7 are outpacing new Windows 8 installs.

One alarming statistic from the report is that Windows XP, which hasn't received any security updates since April, is still used by 23.87 percent of web users.

Windows 7 has maintained the spot for the most widely used operating system. The operating system’s share has gone up by 1.5% to mark 52.71 percent of all the share. We can confidently blame OEMs for it, as recently HP ditched Windows 8 computers again in favor of selling Windows 7-powered machines.

Windows XP still remains a problem for Microsoft. Despite being out of company’s update cycle, it still has 23.87% share. Since the last month, the decade old operating system has only dropped a 0.02% share. Its successor Windows Vista is still booting 3.07% market share, with an ever so slight increase in its share.

Source: WinBeta