14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not a secret anymore that Microsoft is retiring Windows XP next year but, as far as users are concerned, the ancient operating system is still a good choice for old hardware.
That’s why Windows XP is still powering 37.19 percent of computers worldwide, according to a new batch of statistics released by market researcher Net Applications.
This makes the aging product the second most popular operating system in the world, very close to Windows 7 that’s still leading the charts with 44.49 percent.
The strange thing, however, is that Windows XP isn’t actually losing users at all, despite Microsoft’s efforts to show everyone that sticking to this platform beyond its retirement date is very dangerous.
Windows XP has actually managed to boost its market share by 0.02 percent last month and, even though this is a very slight increase, it’s just another sign that users aren’t yet ready to abandon the soon-to-be 12-year-old operating system.
XP has barely lost users in the last few months, but Microsoft still hopes to cut its market share to about 10 percent by April 2014.
”Now is the time for enterprise to consider Windows 8 with Windows 8.1. It is only 273 days away until the end of Windows XP support,” Microsoft’s CFO Tami Reller said during the Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 in Houston, Texas.
“If Microsoft wants people to upgrade from XP, then it should have produced a viable replacement OS for XP. What's the point of upgrading to Windows 8, if Microsoft are going to dump it and replace it with Windows 9 in a few months? Might as well stick with familiar, reliable XP,” one of our readers wrote.