Windows 7 has the most to gain from XP’s impending demise

With support for Windows XP due to end next week, XP’s market share has predictably started to decline… but it’s not benefiting Windows 8 nearly as much as it’s benefiting Windows 7. The Next Web points out that NetMarketShare’s latest numbers show a predictable decline of nearly two percentage points for Windows XP over the last month along with a rise of a combined 0.62 percentage points for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 and a rise of 1.46 percentage points for Windows 7. This means that between the end of February and the end of March, Windows 7 adoption grew more than twice as fast as Windows 8 adoption.

None of this is all that surprising. Windows 8 has been a very polarizing operating system for many PC users and anyone who has resisted upgrading from Windows XP for this long will probably decide to go with a platform that feels more familiar to them and not a platform that’s radically different from the old one.

Speaking of Windows XP, NetMarketShare says it still accounted for 27.69% of the desktop market at the end of March, which means that there are a lot of users out there who are willing to brave the storm of malware that hackers have planned for them once support ends on April 8th.

More from BGR: All of a sudden, Microsoft is making a lot of the right moves

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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