14 DAY TRIAL // During the second quarter of the current year, Microsoft’s Windows operating system has managed to grab only 4.5 percent of the tablet PC market, a recent report from Strategy Analytics claims.
The platform falls far behind rivals Android and iOS, and the lack of applications appears to be the main reason for this, at least when it comes to Windows RT.
However, the research firm suggests that Microsoft’s presence on the tablet segment could grow in the third quarter of the year, due to higher Windows RT shipments fueled by massive price cuts performed by all of its partners.
“Microsoft has reduced prices by $150 and other vendors even more; they are still not cheap, but are much more where they should be to compete. The shortage of apps continues to be a problem, with seemingly little incentive for developers to work on the platform,” Strategy Analytics notes.
Of a total of 51.7 million tablet PCs shipped in Q2 2013 (White-Box Tablets included), only 2.3 million were powered by Windows.
However, the growth is significant when compared to the second quarter of the last year, when Windows was present on only 0.2 million tablets out there, accounting for only 0.5 percent of the total shipments.