When Tim Cook took the stage yesterday, he was out for blood. One of his most vicious attacks came in the form of an OS market share comparison, in which he noted that while Mavericks had already been installed on more than half of OS X computers, Windows 8 was still struggling to top 15%. There’s no doubt that Microsoft is struggling to convince users to migrate, but the latest data from Net Applications has a silver lining: Windows 8.1 has finally attained a higher market share than Windows 8.
As The Next Web points out, it has taken Windows 8.1 seven months to overtake its predecessor, which has all but stalled out in terms of growth. In fact, Windows 8 actually lost 0.07% of the market share while Windows 8.1 snagged 0.47%, combining for a disappointing 0.40% growth of all Windows 8 software.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Windows 7 has continued to grow at a faster rate than Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 combined, bringing in an additional 0.79% of the market to push the last-gen OS over 50% of the total share. Windows XP has finally started its steady decline now that Microsoft has ended support for the 13-year-old OS once and for all, but it still retains over 1/4 of the market share.
OS X might not be in contention for the most popular operating system, but keeping customers up-to-date with the latest software has given Apple a major PR advantage over the fragmented Windows audience.
