Microsoft’s Windows 8 Crawls Past 9.25% Market Share In October

The latest figures from market researcher Net Applications show that Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating systems (Windows 8 and Windows 8.1) managed to surpass 9.25% market share by the end of October 2013. That 9.25% is split 7.53% Windows 8 and 1.72% Windows 8.1. The figures look reasonably good showing that Windows 8.1 has managed to stimulate some additional interest in Windows 8 as we’ve seen quite a sharp rise in Windows 8(.1) since July. Microsoft announced its consumer preview of Windows 8.1 on June 26th and since then growth in Windows 8(.1) has been quite sharp. Windows 8(.1) has also managed to capture some of the Windows XP defectors, though a lot of these have ended up going to Windows 7 as the below graph shows.

Considering Windows 8.1 is only two weeks old these results are neither spectacular nor awful, they are pretty average. Over the next month we will really be able to see whether Windows 8.1 captured the attention of consumers or not because 1.72% after only 2 weeks doesn’t really tell us all that much. Of course you could look at this more pessimistically (or realistically?) and say that Windows 8.1 has been available for consumers to download and install since June 26th, so it has only managed 1.72% in 4 and a half months, when you frame it like that it doesn’t look good.

Image #1 courtesy of Softpedia and Image #2 courtesy of ZDNet, Information provided by NetMarketShare/NetApplications