Moving into the second quarter of 2013, Windows 8 seems content to continue its slow but steady growth. All other Windows versions declined last month, however, and the newest flavor simply wasn’t enough to stop the negative.
The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that April 2013 was a decent one for Windows 8, which gained 0.53 percentage points (from 3.31 percent to 3.84 percent) while Windows 7 dipped 0.01 percentage points (from 44.73 percent to 44.72 percent).
Windows 8 isn’t growing as quickly as some would have hoped. It gained 0.66 percentage points in December, meaning all four months in 2013 so far have seen smaller gains.
With the Windows 8 upgrade deal for $15 having expired at the end of February, it is difficult for Microsoft to avoid a slowdown in sales. The company has to rely on students taking advantage of the $70 price tag to spur sales and of course on OEMs luring in new customers with unique hardware propositions.
Yet this is going to be even harder with the larger anticipation of Windows Blue, widely expected to be announced in just over a month from now, and expected to be released before the end of the year. In fact, Microsoft recently announced Build 2013, where it will be unveiling Blue.
In January, Windows 7 lost market share for the first time since its release, just a month after passing the 45 percent mark. It started to slowly climb back up, but after every month it looks less and likely it will ever reach that point again.
Windows Vista meanwhile was down 0.24 percentage points (from 4.99 percent to 4.75 percent), after finally falling below the 5 percent mark in March. Windows XP lost 0.42 percentage points (from 38.73 percent to 38.31 percent).
At the end of 2012, Windows managed to increase its market share after six months of losses, mainly thanks to Windows 7 and Windows 8. In 2013, however, Windows went back to losing share, though it did gain a bit in March.
Between March and April, Windows lost 0.11 percentage points (from 91.89 percent to 91.78 percent). This was OS X’s and Linux’s gain, which grabbed 0.07 percentage points (to 7.01 percent) and 0.04 percentage points (to 1.21 percent), respectively.
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month. The service monitors some 40,000 Web sites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views. To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than of page views, but if you prefer the latter, the equivalent data is available here.
See also – As Windows Phone 8 fulfilled the Windows Phone promise, so will Blue complete Windows 8
Image credit: Robert Linder
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