Windows 8 December, 2013 Market share

Still no good news, my guess here is the consumers are still speaking with their wallets and pocketbooks. So the vocal minority can still scream at the top of their lungs, few, if any, are buying into it...........................

Windows 8 Drops to 6.66% Market Share, Windows 8.1 Takes 2.64%

Edit; I do understand that hopefully January would be a slight bumps as people get their holiday presents, but we shall see...................

 

November 1 market share for Windows 8.x was 9.25. December 1 market share for Windows 8.x was 9.30. (Source is the article in the original post and the previous month's article from the same source, adding 8.0 and 8.1 together). A very small gain, but certainly not a drop. And the small gain is not surprising considering that we're between the back-to-school rush and the holiday rush.

Funny how the author manages to turn a small-but-steady gain into how Windows 8 "drops" market share by referring to Windows 8.0 as "Windows 8" and making it the focus of the headline two months after 8.1 came out.

 

A 0.05% gain is pathetic by any measure, noting, in addition, that Windows 7 gained more market share (0.22%) than Windows 8.x. Once again, we see people making excuses for this poor performance. Whistling past the graveyard...

 

Excuses are like ________, everyone has one and all of them have that same air to them. as a side note; M$ is no different than a lot of stuck up people though in that they think theirs don't stink......................

 

- People planning to upgrade their laptops are waiting for more Haswell options?
- People not buying pricy items for themselves in a month where one typically spends on others?
- People are going out of their way to scrape up the last Windows 7 OEM discs from Newegg?
- Computer sales are STILL DOWN?

Oh wait, don't let me get in the way of your confirmation bias.

 

I will gladly post ANY good news on the Windows 8 front, I just haven't found any viable good news. The only ones report using some new math that just does not make sense. Also I am the first to state where these biased reports will show 8.0 loosing ground where as 8.x is actually, at least for now, holding ground. So while the sky is not falling the fog has yet to clear. The forecast for now looks to be many a damp and dingy day in front of us as well....................

 

Good list of excuses. I like it. Cute.

Just let us know when there's a month when it is fair to discuss Win8's market "success".

Very funny. Feel free to point out where, exactly, you find "bias" in the post of mine you were quoting.

P.S.: Oh, and I forgot to re-add this: Potential sales of "OEM discs" have nothing whatsoever to do with this, as you could easily understand if you would bother to find out what it is that the quoted statistics describe. A good way to do so would be to read the article in question, or any of the ones TANWare links to below.

 

TBH, I don't think he is claiming you are being "bias" but that the confirmation is of our bias. I'll be honest I have no love of Windows 8.x as is and my bias, at this moment of time, is towards its failure in the market. This as a success would mean that it will stay as is and more importantly show that a company like M$ can thumb its nose at what consumers want and then do whatever it wants. Now would I love the OS we all asked for and anticipated at the time of the beta, surely I would and then I would be very happy to see the OS succeed.

on topic;

Windows 7 market share still growing despite newer operating systems - latimes.com
Windows 8.x growth flatlines, Internet Explorer 11 makes a splash | Ars Technica
Microsoft Windows 8 OS market share growth trails Windows 7 in November 2013.
Windows 7 Handily Bests Windows 8 And 8.1′s Minute Market Share Gains In November | TechCrunch
Market Share of Windows 8 , Windows 8.1

Edit; as a side note Windows 7 official retail sale already ended 10/30/2013 and scheduled end of PC sales with windows 7 ends 10/30/2014. This could be when you start to see other available OS's start to make inroads................

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/lifecycle?T1=winxp

 

I'm really not sure what this poster is trying to say (which is why I am asking), but the term "confirmation bias" does have a distinct meaning, see, e.g., Wikipedia.

 

Windows 7 gains more market share than Windows 8, yet people still try to make excuses for Windows 8....

 

With support for XP ending, a lot of businesses are transitioning away from XP. Win7 is a mature product, several years old and with all the kinks and bugs worked out, so it's a practical solution for businesses who have been using XP for years to transition to. Win8 is still relatively new in comparison. My office is transitioning from XP to 7, and the question of user interface (the main flash point in discussions on this forum) was not the core issue in that decision-making process. I suspect slow consumer sales (November is after the back-to-school rush and before the holiday rush) and enterprise finally bailing on Windows XP is why Win7 gained more ground than Win8 this month.

TanWare, "other OSes" have been making inroads for over a year. Android (in most of the world) and iOS (in the US), have been eroding desktop OS usage since before Win8 launched. That's why the entire PC market is shrinking--a trend that started when all new PCs shipped with Win7. And OSX's market share is also shrinking according to TheNextWeb's month-by-month numbers. So it's not that people are bailing from Windows to other desktop OSes; it's that more and more people are bailing from desktop OSes entirely.

 

PC Shipments Collapse At Fastest Pace On Record

PC Shipments Collapse At Fastest Pace On Record | Zero Hedge

"Interest in PCs has remained limited, leading to little indication of positive growth beyond replacement of existing systems," is IDC's under-stated way of saying that personal-computer shipments are projected to fall 10.1% this year, by far the biggest annual decline on record. At IDC’s projected sales rates, shipments worldwide will stay at just more than 300 million through 2017, or barely above 2008 levels.

And despite industry efforts, PC usage has not moved significantly beyond consumption and productivity tasks to differentiate PCs from other devices. As a result, PC lifespans continue to increase, thereby limiting market growth."

 

What I would love to see is a study on why Windows 8.x adoption has been so slow. Back in the Vista era it was obvious that a lot of people were consciously choosing XP since almost every PC had a downgrade to XP option, but is Windows 8.x uptake slow because people are consciously choosing 7, or is it because people nowadays would rather spend their money on an iPad Air than upgrade their C2D-era PC, which they feel is "good enough"?

I suspect it's a mix of both, but it'd be nice to see some actual data.

 

I suspect on the enterprise level it's primarily an issue of preferring Win7 to Win8 (though not necessarily due to aesthetic issues frequently discussed here, but more due to stability and maturity issues, where a mature product like Win7 has a clear advantage). And I suspect on the consumer level it's people preferring to get an iPad instead of upgrading their C2D PC. I know a lot of people, particularly of the baby boomer generation, who now use iPads as their main home computing devices.

But like you, I don't have hard data to prove either, because causation is something that's hard to prove through data. Would the consumer shift to iPads be slower or faster if Microsoft had doubled down on a Win7-style interface instead of creating a touchscreen-friendly interface? I suspect faster, but there's no way to prove it short of conjuring up an alternate universe. Would enterprise be upgrading to a one-year-old operating system if Win8 had a Win7-style user interface? I suspect not, but once again there's no way to prove it without conjuring up an alternate universe.

 

The BIG driver in the PC industry going back to the mid to late 80's was PC games. It was new and since the average user wanted a PC and wasn't a coder they played PC games or connected to either Compuserve or GEnieOnline.

There was no such thing as 3D graphics back then for home PC. So the CPU did all the work. As PC games caught on the catalyst for sales were either the latest 2D graphics card or the latest 386/486 CPU. Intel banked because as Microsoft expanded it's OS it put more demands on the CPU.

With the advent of home videogame consoles the PC games market has essentially dried up. With 3D graphics cards the CPU can get offloaded quite a bit so you don't need the latest Intel CPU for the basics. And that in turn has hurt PC sales because I can comfortably run Windows 8 on a 2007 laptop. So why upgrade? That's why the PC industry is hurting and the other trend is for the OS to handle older hardware much better. In the past a new OS pushed PC hardware so in most cases people upgraded their CPU's drives and ram.

 

At my company we tested a small pilot Win8(.1) group. They are generally happy, we don't hear any complaints, and out of 20ish people, only one person actually decided they just didn't want it (think they ended up on Linux anyway). The rest seem fine, and we even got some compliments. In the end we decided to stick to Win7 only because of administrative ease. Rather than have a bunch of Win7 AND Win8.x machines, we'd just keep everyone Win7. It really didn't come down to more than that. Wasn't even a money thing since all the PC laptops we buy have Win8 Pro licenses already.

It was lethargy, basically.

 

I some how doubt it was just "Lethargy". Are all of the machines in the entire company already of the Win8 Pro era? If not then at least some new licenses may be in order. Another issue may be the costs of learning curve of all employee's and training along with deployment etc.. It is impossible here to know the work process at every company so there may be models where Win8 does not interfere, I can however envision quite a few where it would interfere. With that too though the admins can customize deployed images that along with standardized third party apps.

Gamers still push the envelope with PC's. This is why I prefer a gamer system for my own use, even though I do not really game. Even with win8 I am sure people still purchase mid to higher end systems. With some of these ultra high end though Win7 becomes an option, so some of the increase may be from that too. All of that is anecdotal at best because as mentioned there is no hard data.

Even though people do not want to replace their C2D machine From Vista to Win 7 and now Win8 on the backend there has been improvements in resources, newer hardware compatibility and extended support time periods. From Vista to Win7 this was a given with the upgrade and over time led to Vista's decline in numbers. Win8.x would have enjoyed a similar situation if the UI were not so vehemently opposed by consumers. This especially true of when the OS was at such an low cost. We are not talking expansion of the market here but market share, essentially what is the preferred OS being used by people.

Argue as you may it is the declining hardware deployment, probably partially due to Win8, the numbers just do not make sense. If they did then when Windows 7 came out the people would have had Vista numbers climbing over the growth of Win7 machines. That situation would have nothing to do with Ipads. While Win8 supporters make a good sounding argument in the end the data in no way supports their theories. While saying without an alternate universe there is no way to prove the points, sure there is, put out a popular UI with win8 and watch at least some of the trends change. No one ever said put out a Win7 UI, we are all saying put out an improvement of the Win7 UI not the garbage you are handing us with the tough if you don't like it attitude.........................

 

My comments clearly stated, that all of the PCs we buy have Win8 Pro licenses already.

I also said we didn't want a bunch of Win7 AND Win8 machines. I said this because yes, there is a cutoff. We're not gonna upgrade one that requires a license purchase, that is not mandatory.

It was lethargy, and I can say that because I was in the meetings. Were you in the meetings?

 

Nope not there, but that is not lethargy and makes corporate sense to keep just one OS.

Lethargy | Define Lethargy at Dictionary.com

Edit; unless I am just misreading your post and you are talking about the people being put to sleep by the prospect of having Windows 8?

Edit2; Also a good reason for anyone to purchase Win8 pro system is Win7 pro downgrade rights built in.

 

Thank you for posting that, then you saw "indifferent" and "apathetic" in there.

Those were the reactions to invoking yet another project to develop a Windows 8 deployment image. It wasn't about "Windows 8 suxx hurrrr" or red eyes about Start buttons or fist-pounding about no more shiny. It was a simple "don't feel like it." I *like* Windows 8.x and even I wasn't gonna argue. I have a perfectly good Windows 7 image that took some time to make, I didn't feel like putting more resources into it.

 

Either indifference or apathetic means the decision could have really went either way, don't feel like it or we have a perfectly good image now is more like resistance to change just for the sake of change. Again I can see where the UI may not get in the way of productivity as IT can customize as image as needed and this easily can include third party apps as needed.