14 DAY TRIAL // Even since he took over the top job at the Cupertino-based company, Tim Cook used pretty much every occasion to at least mock Microsoft and its latest projects, obviously in an attempt to emphasize that Apple-branded products are more appealing than the ones coming out of Redmond.
Yesterday's press event, which Apple used to unveil iOS8 and Apple OS X Yosemite, made no exception to this rule and Tim Cook used some slides to state what has already been said millions of times: Windows 8 suffered from slow adoption despite the millions of dollars invested by Microsoft to make it successful.
The only problem with Tim Cook's slide shown during the WWDC 2014 keynote was that the figures he presented weren't entirely accurate and at some level, he mocked Microsoft for absolutely no reason.
But let's take everything one at a time and see what he said and why he was wrong.
First of all, the slide suggested that out of the global Windows market share, Windows 8 is holding only 14 percent, which Tim Cook said was living proof that the so-called modern operating system was one of the slowest adopted platforms ever.
While Windows 8 failed to excite after launch, together with the updates it received in the last six months, it's winning back users and many are finally discovering the benefits that it actually brings. Truth is, it did lack some features at first, but Microsoft acknowledged its mistakes very fast and addressed them in the next updates.
At the same time, the company also announced some improvements that could boost Windows 8's market share even more in the near future, including the return of the Start menu.
The second thing that Tim Cook said while he pointed to the Windows 8 slide was that Mavericks (which was until last night the latest OS X update available to users) was running on 51 percent of Apple computers, while Windows 8 only accounted for 14 percent of the total Windows share.
Cook also added that it currently had 80 million Mac users worldwide, which means that more than 40 million have already installed Mavericks. While Apple's CEO probably forgot about how many people actually tried to go back to Mountain View due to the shortcomings of Mavericks, the Windows and Mac OS X user base can hardly be compared.
Windows currently has 1.25 billion users, according to Microsoft's very own stats, and Redmond said approximately 6 months after the launch of Windows 8 that 40 million consumers already installed the modern OS version on their computers. This means that in six months, Windows 8 alone reached the same number of users as Mavericks and, at this point, obviously has more adopters than the entire user base of Mac OS X.
And for the sake of comparison, the latest set of market share figures provided by Net Applications for the month of May 2014 claim that Windows is now powering 90.99 percent of the desktops worldwide, while Mac is way behind with only 7.39 percent.