Record XP-Vista switch: too little too late?
In the month before Windows 7 is released, monthly figures show the biggest ever switch from XP to Vista. But the gulf between the two remains immense.
The figures come from Net Applications which gets data by tracking users from the 40,000 Web sites it provides services to. That’s not a perfect system, but it’s a wide enough sample base to provide credible figures, particularly when tracking long-term trends.
For August, the firm found 71.8 percent of people were running XP compared with 18.8 percent for Vista and 1.2 percent for Windows 7 (the first time it’s cracked the one percent share mark.) That’s a record monthly drop of 1.1 percentage points for XP, most of which went to Vista which had its biggest monthly rise in over a year, 0.9 percentage points.
While the August to July comparisons are accurate, both month’s figures may actually underestimate the long-term XP-Vista shift. That’s because, as Computerworld notes, Net Applications began adjusting its figures from June this year to take account of where in the world site visitors came from. This means past figures for XP may have been artificially high (by not fully representing less developed markets) and thus drops this year may look smaller than they really were.
(However, it’s the Mac share which is most affected by the change, dropping below five percent, which appears to back previous theories that putting too much weight on markets such as the US artificially boosted Apple’s supposed market share.)
It’s important to note that even this record XP-Vista trend doesn’t signify a particularly rapid shift of momentum. If August’s pace of change continued, it would be January 2014 before Vista gained a larger share than XP. Given most new computers will be running Windows 7 from now on, and given that many businesses in particular appear set to skip Vista altogether, it’s conceivable that Vista will never have a bigger market share than its predecessor.
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