14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 8’s adoption rate remains slow, even though Microsoft is getting ready to launch the 8.1 OS update supposed to fix so many things with the product.
But as far as Toshiba and its business sales are concerned, 99 percent of its sales are still going to Windows 7, with only a few people actually choosing Windows 8.
Toshiba's B2B product marketing manager Cindy Zwerling told ZDNet in an interview that Windows 8 “remains some distant plan in the future,” explaining that Windows 8.1 indeed has some potential to boost sales of Microsoft’s modern platform.
“Windows 7 is clearly the enterprise operating system at this time,” she said. “But there are pockets of the corporate population that use [detachable] tablets, and might be running Windows 8. But for your standard clamshell notebook? It's Windows 7. From a business perspective, I would say 99 percent of our sales are Windows 7.”
Unsurprisingly, Windows 7 remains the number one operating system in the world, with market researchers pointing to a share of more than 45 percent. Windows 8 is still far behind with approximately 8 percent.
Since Windows 7 proves to be a very popular choice right now, Microsoft is expected to face even more problems than with XP when its end-of-support approaches.
Mainstream support for Windows 7 is set to end on January 13, 2015, while the extended support will come to an end on January 14, 2020.
As you probably heard, Windows XP will be officially retired next year on April 8, with Microsoft now struggling to move users from its dying platform to either Windows 7 or Windows 8. More than 30 percent of computers worldwide are still running Windows XP right now, with only a few users expressing their desire to dump the OS and switch to a newer platform.