Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 pass 10% market share, Windows XP falls below 30%

I've enjoyed my Surface Pro 2. Windows 8 is quite nice on proper hardware. It's nice to have a full blown computer in something that is heavier and bigger than an ipad, but not terribly so much heavier.

I couldn't decide whether or not to get the DVP8 or the Nexus 7, so I got both. Finding myself grabbing the DVP8 most of the time for for IE metro...yea...It has flash support and a much better mobile browsing. Better than any browser on Android anyway.

I've been using Windows 8 on the desktop for over a year. It's better than Windows 7 - switching between start screen and desktop is just a left thumb keypress...and the start screen (or some Windows 8 app) only shows up on one of my monitors, and I can toss that screen back and forth between monitors depending on which part of the desktop I want to see.

And that's gotten better with Windows 8.1.

I have a Nexus 7 and iPad, but for a replacement to an older netbook, purchased an Asus Transformer t100. It's a <$400 10" convertible tablet (it includes a keyboard dock, and can function well in either tablet or laptop configuration.)

It's quickly become my favorite device, and I love the "full-desktop" power of Windows 8.1 combined with the dock for traditional apps. The only gripe I have is the dearth of Metro apps on the Windows App store. 1st party apps from Microsoft tend to be very usable, but the few 3rd party apps I've tried have clearly been a halfhearted port, and tend to be very buggy.

To echo an above poster, Modern IE is surprisingly great, with the exception of sometimes jaggedy text rendering at smaller sizes (anyone else experience this?) All in all, I've gotten far more value than I expected both from the price and Windows 8.1 itself.

I picked up the asus t100, and am finding myself using that instead of my ipad. It's nice that you can run everything, and view anything, while still having a couch-friendly tablet interface for browsing and reading. It frustrates me now to use my regular laptop and not have a touch screen.

Windows 8 makes a lot more sense when you use it on a device it was designed for. Even one of the staunch anti-8 coworkers at my office had to admit the t100 was nice to use. It's also amazing how fast the bay trail atom is, yesterday i was playing mirror's edge on it :)

I can't help but think that if there was a Venue Pro 8 with a decent dock so that you could use it as a desktop and take it to a meeting as a tablet would be just a no-brainer for corporate IT shops. I can't count the number of times I have seem someone running between meeting rooms balancing their laptop like a waitress running through a restaurant with a huge tray above her head. So, maybe a thunderbolt port for docking?

Hey, that looks great. When I'm near my windows 8 computer I'll be sure to give it a spin!

I tried it on my desktop for a few weeks but I just couldn't handle it. It was really a terrible experience for me. I could see how it would work on tablets though. I went back to Windows 7 and probably won't upgrade again.

And it is only 3 months away from out of support.

It still does what most people need.

Ummm... no. The "news" is that it still has that 30% market share after 13 years ago and soon going to be unsupported.

If mostly all you do is fire up a browser to use the web then there's pretty much no reason to upgrade from XP, I'd expect there's a lot of machines out there which essentially fall into that use case, why spend money on something for no appreciable gain?

Thanks for that. I've just acquired a new pet peeve: not only is "market share" not "usage share", but usage share is not the same as web usage which is all web analytics can measure.

If you throw out China, IE6 looks like it's mostly gone.

http://www.modern.ie/ie6countdown#map

I'm sure there a few corporate holdouts (and South Korea), but I'm sure many people here can finally say goodbye. The link at the bottom discussed the current browser numbers.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/01/02/ie11-triples-market...

IE7 is pretty much gone too. Now it's IE8-IE11+ for the next 3-5 years.

IE6 is pretty much dead. It's IE8 that won't die.

I think it safe to say that your day to day observations won't line up with the general public.

I got a surface pro 2 and am very surprised at how much I enjoy it. Playing games like Myst off of Steam blew me away. And this might sound crazy... but IE 11 is my default browser. Chrome is almost unusable on it but IE works great. Again, Very Surprised at how awesome it is.

It's a tablet size computer, NOT a tablet sized phone.

I'll be the guy who links to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

The Wikipedia page summarizes the data from Net Applications (the data source for the article), Stat Counter and other popular sources. They break out mobile separately, but as for Chromebook, the numbers I've seen are very low (< 1%), so it probably gets lumped in the "Others" category.

What's this, 2002? Is 2014 really going to be the Year Of Linux On The Desktop?

There is no rise in Linux adoption unless you count ChromeOS.

I use Linux on the desktop but it has been a while since I have seen or heard of anyone making the move to Ubuntu or anything else install-yourself on the desktop. However I do know of lots of happy Chromebook users.

There is no headline story here as far as Linux is concerned. As I see it there is a very slow replacement rate for regular PC's - 10% market share in over a year looks to me like only 11% of PC's have been replaced in the last year. Given PC's are supposed to have an average lifespan of 5-7 years that means Windows really is not selling very well.

Maybe, but 8.1 killed all of our VS2005 projects. If you are a developer that doesn't want to do upgrades on potentially fragile build files it is not a god send.

I wouldn't be surprised if XP's share increased. Most of the desktops at a large healthcare company we had as a client were still running IE6.