Windows 8, Windows 8.1 Now Account for Over 16 Percent of Market: Survey

Adoption of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 has jumped in the month of October, according to the latest figures.

As per Net Applications' October report, Windows 8 gained 0.29 percentage points reaching up to 5.88 percent, while the newer Windows 8.1 jumped by 4.25 percent to 10.92 percent. Both the OS versions covered up 16.80 percent as in October. In September they were at 12.26 percent in total.

As for adoption of the older, but still very popular Windows 7, its share rose by a negligible 0.34 percentage points to 53.05 percent, up from September's 52.71 percent noted by Net Applications.

VentureBeat notes that Windows 7 saw a steady growth throughout 2014 with minor drops in between, adding that the firm on Friday finally stopped selling the consumer version of the OS to OEMs. This means that supply of consumer machines coming preloaded with Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate will end shortly, and will greatly affect the OS' market share.

Windows 7 Professional however will continue to be sold for enterprise machines until at least October 31, 2015, with Microsoft previously promising to provide one year of notice prior to the end of sale date.

Microsoft will also end the Mainstream support for Windows 7 (including Window 7 Professional) on January 13. The Mainstream support for Windows 7 includes OS includes bug fixes, design changes, incident support and more.

Net Applications notes that Windows Vista's market share dropped 0.25 percent to 2.82 percent in October, whilst Windows XP slipped a massive 6.69 percent down to 17.18 percent.

The survey also finds that Windows occupied 91.53 percent of the overall worldwide OS market share in October, with OS X accounting for 7.05 percent, and Linux for 1.41 percent.

It is worth noting that Microsoft recently released an updated version of Outlook for Mac systems. Microsoft also said it plans to release a new version of its popular Office software package for Mac computers - but not until next year.