As if last month’s surprising surge in Windows XP’s global market share wasn’t enough of a bummer, the soon to be retired operating system hasn’t stopped being a pain in the side for Microsoft. From the 29.23% desktop users that were hung up on Windows XP as of last month’s report, the new stats from reliable NetMarketShare suggest that the decade old operating system has registered a spike in its user share to end up with a slightly increased 29.53%.
While Microsoft is trying to convince consumers to switch over to a modern operating system, surprisingly, people seem to love this old operating system so much that more of them are now hopping on to it.
Meanwhile, it isn’t all bad news. Although Windows 8 fell from the 6.62% it possessed in January, to 6.38% in February, its successor Windows 8.1 managed a significant spike from 3.94% to 4.30%. Combined, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 saw a share of 10.68%. Meanwhile, both Windows Vista and Windows 7 have reported a slight slump in their market shares.
For better or worse, 13 years ago Microsoft made Windows XP. While the operating system had helped the company establish global domination, people are having a hard time bidding it farewell. In the meantime, Microsoft has already advised businesses which are running Windows XP and Office 2003 that they are risking “serious problems”.
As of April 8, Microsoft will stop providing security support to Windows XP along with the decade old productivity suite Microsoft Office 2003. Incidentally, on the same day, Microsoft might launch Windows 8.1 Update 1.
