14 DAY TRIAL // China is one of the countries where Windows XP remains unbelievably popular, even though Microsoft has continuously asked users to upgrade to a newer OS version in order to remain completely secure.
Figures provided by StatCounter for the month of April 2014 show that in China Windows XP and Windows 7 are still leading the market, even though Microsoft has aggressively promoted Windows 8 and 8.1 all over the world.
At this point, Windows 7 has a market share of 47.23 percent in China, while Windows XP comes second with 44.07 percent. Windows XP reached end of support on April 8, so it no longer receives updates and security patches.
Windows 8.1 is still far behind with only 1.67 percent of the Chinese market, while Windows 8 adoption is still going awful, as it's now installed on 3.36 percent of the computers in the country.
Windows XP undoubtedly remains a very popular choice for all users worldwide and Microsoft knows this very well, so the company this morning issued an update supposed to fix a critical Internet Explorer flaw and thus keep the millions of consumers still running the unsupported OS on the safe side.
The company, however, warned that this is only an exception and the same thing won't happen again in the future, as it now wanted to keep users on the safe side because some are yet to complete the upgrade to another OS version.
“Even though Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft and is past the time we normally provide security updates, we’ve decided to provide an update for all versions of Windows XP (including embedded), today. We made this exception based on the proximity to the end of support for Windows XP,” Adrienne Hall, general manager, Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft, said in a statement.
“The reality is there have been a very small number of attacks based on this particular vulnerability and concerns were, frankly, overblown. Unfortunately this is a sign of the times and this is not to say we don’t take these reports seriously. We absolutely do. “
Statistics provided by Net Applications for the global market show that Windows XP is installed on 26 percent of the desktop computers worldwide. The market share is still expected to drop significantly in the coming months, as more large companies and users complete the transition to a newer OS such as Windows 7 and 8.1.