Thursday, February 20, 2014

Windows 8 Consumers Outnumber Mac Users

According to StatCounter, the Windows 8 operating system by Microsoft has now outnumbered Apple’s OS X in total market share. The numbers for September show 7.46 percent market share for Windows 8 OS, which is an increase of 0.44 percent over the old month. This was more than enough to surpass the market share of Mac, which dropped by 0.2 percent to reach 6.98 percent.

Meanwhile, the old versions of Windows are somewhat steady. Windows 7 had a 0.03 drop to reach 51.98 percent, Windows XP gained by 0.01 points to reach 20.59 percent and Vista gained 0.09 points to reach 5.3 percent market share. If this news sounds similar, it is because last month, the rival measurement firm NetMarketShare found that the Windows 8 market share had cruised past OS X in the month of August. This trend continued in the month of September, with Windows 8 rising to 8.02 percent when compared to 7.54 percent for the Mac OS X.

NetMarketShare and StatCounter use different methodologies but both of the firms get their data by measuring the traffic on sampling of large websites. Both these place the Windows 8 usage ahead of all the versions of OS X combined.

Upgrade Blues

Nearly half of the Mac users have the latest version of the Mac OS called as Mountain Lion, according to the firm NetMarketShare. This means that the strategy of Apple to charge only 20 dollars for operating system upgrade is paying off. The large majority of the PC users are still using older versions of Windows. Microsoft had originally charged 49 dollars for the Windows 8 Pro upgrades before increasing the price to $120 for Windows 8 and $200 for the Windows 8 Pro. Lower Windows 8 versions will be charged less when compared to Windows 8 Pro.

The rising share of the Windows 8 OS is encouraging for Microsoft, but the greater health of computer industry is in jeopardy. The PC sales across the world are dropping and back-to-school sales in US dropped by 2.4 percent according to The NPD Group. This is because many of the users have turned to tablets instead of the $500 basic laptop PCs. The way for the PC makers may not be in the raw market share, but it lays in the high end Windows computers that are priced over 700 dollars.

The back-to-school sales of these computers rose by 24 percent this year. If you wish to know more on the sales of different Windows 8 versions, you can visit the official Microsoft website.

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