With support for Windows XP due to end next week, XP’s market share has predictably started to decline… but it’s not benefiting Windows 8 nearly as much as it’s benefiting Windows 7. The Next Web points out that NetMarketShare’s latest numbers show a predictable decline of nearly two percentage points for Windows XP over the last month along with a rise of a combined 0.62 percentage points for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 and a rise of 1.46 percentage points for Windows 7. This means that between the end of February and the end of March, Windows 7 adoption grew more than twice as fast as Windows 8 adoption.
None of this is all that surprising. Windows 8 has been a very polarizing operating system for many PC users and anyone who has resisted upgrading from Windows XP for this long will probably decide to go with a platform that feels more familiar to them and not a platform that’s radically different from the old one.
Speaking of Windows XP, NetMarketShare says it still accounted for 27.69% of the desktop market at the end of March, which means that there are a lot of users out there who are willing to brave the storm of malware that hackers have planned for them once support ends on April 8th.
