XP grows five percent Windows market share figures are all over the shop

Windows market share figures are all over the shop as XP grows five percent

NET APPLICATIONS, the analytics company which produces the figures that we use to report the operating system market share every month, has reported strange anomalies for the second time in recent months.

The Netmarketshare figures have always been fairly consistent, but during December a huge drop in share for Windows 8.x was reported, while Windows XP, which reached end of life in April, grew five percent after a slow, steady decline in recent months.

The figures were withdrawn and recalculated at the end of last week. However, the underlying trends remain the same, showing Windows XP jumping from 13.57 percent last month to 18.26 (+4.69).

Meanwhile, Windows 8.1 dropped from 12.1 percent to 9.49 (-7.49). When the dwindling Windows 8 is taken into account, down to 4.03 percent from 6.55 (-2.52), total losses for Windows come to over 10 percent in a single month after a period of growth.

What has caused this bizarre change? We've reached out to Net Applications for a response, but in the meantime cast your mind back to October when the figures had to be revised after a number of Chinese servers, mostly serving XP machines, were omitted from the report.

It could well be that some of these servers have been added back, or perhaps the flood of hacking that took place over the Christmas period borked things.

In any case, Windows 7 has held relatively steady at 56.26 percent (-0.15) and Vista jumped slightly to 2.9 percent (+0.25).

It all points to something very strange going on. In the meantime, take these numbers with a severe pinch of very salty salt, and we'll come back to you when we know more. µ

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