Crack open more champagne, Satya, XP's snowballing to HELL

Netmarketshare says operating system has lost 43 per cent of users in 60 days

It's not often a company would celebrate losing 43 per cent of its users in two months, but Microsoft is probably chuffed that is the fate of Windows XP in October and November.

So says Netmarketshare, one of two analysts whose monthly operating system market share data we trakc. The other, Statcounter, found that XP fell behind Windows 8 .1 during November.

Netmarketshare still has XP ahead of 8.1, with 13.57 per cent of the market compared to 8.1's 12.12. But XP's now lagging Windows 8.x's total of 18.65 per cent for the first time in the company's historical data.

XP's fall is marked: it still ran on 23.87 per cent of Netmarketshare's surveyed devices in September and 17.87 per cent in October. The new figure does mean XP's decline is slowing, but it's still falling fast.

Here's a look at the firm's data for the past twelve months.

	Dec 2013	Jan 14	Feb 14	Mar 14	Apr 14	May 14	June 14	July 14	Aug 2014	Sept 2014	Oct 2014	Nov 2014
XP	28.98	29.23	29.53	27.69	26.29	25.27	25.31	24.82	23.89	23.87	17.18	13.57
Vista	3.61	3.3	3.1	2.99	2.89	2.9	2.95	3.05	3.02	3.07	2.82	2.65
Win 7	47.52	47.49	47.31	48.77	49.27	50.06	50.55	51.22	51.21	52.71	53.05	56.41
Win 8	6.89	6.63	6.38	6.41	6.36	6.29	5.93	5.92	6.28	5.59	5.88	6.55
Win 8.1	3.6	3.95	4.1	4.89	5.88	6.35	6.61	6.56	7.09	6.67	10.92	12.1

Whatever happened in September to spark the crash of XP and the rise of 8.1 was more decisive than any other previous incident. What was that incident? Microsoft's October announcement of its Q1 results included the surprise news that Surface sales had soared to US$908m. At about US$100 per machine, that's a lot of new Surfaces and perhaps the moment the worm began to turn for Windows 8.1. ®