Windows 8.1 would have doubled its usage share in October
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As usual for each start of the month, we now have to review the updated figures from Net Marketshare on operating system usage fee But this month we're in for a surprise: there are big jumps in the quota for each version of Windows, as opposed to the marginal changes we're used to seeing in other monthly reviews.
Specifically, the share of use of Windows 8.1 shoots up compared to previous months, going from 6.67% in September , to 10.92% in October, that is, almost doubling its presence in desktop operating systems.Meanwhile, Windows 8 also increases, although more modestly, from 5.6% to 5.8%. Together, both versions add up to a historical maximum of 16.72%
And at whose expense is this increase occurring? From Windows XP, as the discontinued version of Microsoft's operating system experiences an unprecedented rollback , going from 23.87% to only 17.18%, which implies a drop of more than 6 percentage points in a single month. And Windows 7, meanwhile, continues to break records, hitting a new high of 53.05%.
Rise of Windows 8.1, or early adoption of Windows 10?
How do you explain these drastic changes from one month to the next? One possibility is that there has been a real increase in the use of Windows 8.1, due to increased sales of tablets and cheap PCs, and because of Microsoft's new policy of forcing upgrades from Windows 8 using Windows Update.
However, an error in the figures cannot be ruled out. It seems suspicious that Windows 10 does not appear anywhere in the Net Marketshare figures (and does appear, for example, Windows 98 with less than 0.01% usage), so the total for Windows 8.1 may include Windows 10 Tech Preview users. This would be corroborated by Windows Central and WinBeta commenters, who claim that the user agent delivered by Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 (build 9841) is exactly the same
Anyway, even assuming the above is true, the month-to-month jump in Windows 8.1 quota is too large to attribute entirely to Windows 10 Not even Windows 7 Beta, which was famous for its stability and robustness, reached such high usage levels in the testing phase.So in the rise of Windows 8.1 there should be a bit of both: rapid adoption of the Windows 10 Tech Preview, but also a better positioning of Windows 8.1.
Unfortunately, for now there is no way to know what portion of the increase corresponds to each operating system, but that confusion will not last for a lot, since the most recent builds of Windows 10 (9861 onwards) already show a different user agent than Windows 8.1.
The only thing that is clear for now is that Windows XP is finally in full retirement, to make way for modern operating systems like Windows 7, 8 and 10.
Via | Net Marketshare
