This article is more than 1 year old

Windows XP market share decline stalls, Mac OS X surges

Not even a month without support and Heartbleed is speeding migration

Windows XP's been without support for a month and a day now, but seems not to be falling out of favour any faster than happened when it was supported

We make that assertion on the basis of Netmarketshare's data for April.

Yes, we know Netmarketshare's methodology of assessing market share by looking at web server logs isn't perfect. But whose is?

Setting aside those grumps, the upside is that we've gathered longitudinal data from the firm, which we've once again fed into our automated Table-o-Tron to produce the following look at Windows usage as a percentage of the entire OS market, not just Windows.

October 2013 November 2013 December 2013 January 204 February 2014 March 2014 01/04/14
Windows XP 31.24 31.22 28.98 29.23 29.53 27.69 26.29
Windows Vista 3.63 3.57 3.61 3.3 3.1 2.99 2.89
Windows 7 46.42 46.64 47.52 47.49 47.31 48.77 49.27
Windows 8 7.53 6.66 6.89 6.63 6.38 6.41 6.36
Windows 8.1 1.72 2.64 3.6 3.95 4.1 4.89 5.88

We read this table as suggesting XP migration has actually slowed, as there was a 1.84 per cent decline in the OS' market share between February and March but just a 1.4 per cent decline between March and April. At least Windows 8.1 growth - at .99 per cent - is outstripping Windows 7's 0.5 per cent growth.

Another rating service, Statcounter Global Stats, shows Windows XP dipping faster but Windows 8.1 rising more slowly.

Statcounter also has Mac OS X in clear third place behind XP, with an all-time high 9.22 per cent market share.

Over to you, Satya! ®

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