14 DAY TRIAL // Windows XP will be discontinued in just a few days, but statistics provided by market researcher Net Applications show that only a few users are actually migrating to another operating system.
March 2014 data put Windows XP on the second place in the OS charts with 27.69 percent, behind Windows 7 which continues to lead the market with 48.77 percent.
Even though Microsoft will stop providing support for Windows XP on April 8 and the company has aggressively tried to make people aware of this critical moment, the operating system launched in 2001 barely lost 10 percent of its market share since April 2013.
One year ago, Windows XP was installed on 38.31 percent of the desktop computers worldwide and started a slight decline, losing approximately 1 percent of its users every month.
Everything changed, however, in January this year when Windows XP actually increased its market share from 28.98 percent the month before to 29.30 percent, which was pretty much the most obvious sign that users weren’t planning to upgrade to a newer OS version.
Microsoft obviously warns that sticking to Windows XP is not at all a smart decision, emphasizing that those running this particular platform could be hacked quite easily.
“Microsoft has provided support for Windows XP for the past 12 years. But now the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources toward supporting more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences,” the company said.
Security Essentials, the freeware anti-virus solution release by Microsoft for all pre-Windows 8 users, will no longer be available on Windows XP as of April 8, but existing installations will continue to receive updates for at least one more year.
“Microsoft will also stop providing Microsoft Security Essentials for download on Windows XP on this date. (If you already have Microsoft Security Essentials installed, you will continue to receive AntiMalware signature updates for a limited time, but this does not mean that your PC will be secure because Microsoft will no longer be providing security updates to help protect your PC),” Microsoft also noted.
Starting March 8, Microsoft is also showing upgrade warnings on all Windows XP computers, thus trying to make everyone aware that support is coming to an end. As you can see, all efforts are useless, as users still love Windows XP and many plan to stick to this OS version beyond April 8.