14 DAY TRIAL // North Korea has recently been involved in several international scandals, some of which accused the authorities in Pyongyang of backing a group of hackers that attacked Sony and eventually threatened with terrorist attacks if “The Interview” movie was launched.
2014 was a pretty tumultuous year for North Korea as far as the IT department is concerned, and this chart showing the performance of the Windows operating system in the country is pretty much the living proof that things are changing overnight, not only for the government but also for typical users.
At this point, the North Korean desktop industry continues to be dominated by Windows 7 and Windows XP, both of them having between 30 and 40 percent of the users in the country, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that their positions are secure.
As you can see for yourselves, both dropped and increased their market shares significantly month over month, so it wouldn’t be so shocking to see any of them, be it Windows XP or Windows 7, fall dramatically in one of the next few months.
Windows XP top market share
Windows XP no longer receives support since April 2014, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all users jumped ship the same month.
In fact, in North Korea, Windows XP achieved the best market share in June, when no less than 52.28 percent of the desktop computers in the country were running it.
And yet, the month before, only 36.06 percent of the North Koreans were running Windows XP. Figures also changed significantly in the last few months of 2014, with XP dropping again to 33.62 percent in October.
In Windows 7’s case, things evolved even more abruptly. For instance, in April 2014, 24.97 percent of the North Koreans were running Windows 7 on their PCs, while the next month, these figures were suddenly increased to 42.84 percent. Right now, Windows 7 is the number one OS in North Korea with a share of 39.54 percent.