Report: Rate of Windows 8 Adoption Slows

The May data from NetApplications shows that Windows 8 use is growing, but very slowly. Will the release of Windows 8.1 be able to turn things around for Microsoft?

InformationWeek’s Michael Endler reported, “Interest in [Windows 8] — never great to begin with — has evidently begun to flag. As measured by the 160 million users and 40,000 websites Net Applications monitors, Windows 8’s market penetration in May showed only an 11.8% uptick relative to April. This reverses a recent upward trend. Following its debut, the OS suffered monthly momentum drops until February, after which Win8 began expanding its market share by around 20% per month. But May fell well short of this mark, even with Microsoft hawking dubiously impressive Win8 shipment figures.”

CNET’s Brooke Crothers noted, “The latest figures from Net Applications show Windows 8 with a 4.27 percent share of PCs installed worldwide in May (up from 3.84 percent in April) versus 4.51 percent for Vista. Vista, one of Microsoft’s least popular OSes, was introduced in November of 2006.”

Patrick Seitz with Investor’s Business Daily added, “Meanwhile, Microsoft’s respected Windows 7 operating system, which fixed the bugs in Vista, gained market share in May. Net Applications says 44.9% of PC users worldwide were using Windows 7 in May, up from 44.7% in April. While Windows 7 is no longer available to consumers, corporations are still installing the software on new PCs.”

The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski observed, “At the end of 2012, Windows as a whole managed to increase its market share after six months of losses, mainly thanks to Windows 7 and Windows 8. In 2013, however, Windows has lost share during every month except for March. Between April and May, Windows lost 0.11 percentage points (from 91.78 percent to 91.67 percent). This loss was OS X’s and Linux’s gain, which grabbed 0.06 percentage points (to 7.07 percent) and 0.05 percentage points (to 1.26 percent), respectively.”