‘Windows 8 is destined to be a failure’. How many times have you read this line on the internet, or heard such a thing from your friends? As opposed to what the internet says, Windows 8 is gaining market at a steady rate, atleast in the gaming community. The December 2013 Steam Hardware survey was made available to public and it gives us some rather surprising information about Windows 8.
First and foremost, a disclaimer. As it is an optional survey, so it does not reflect the actual market-share, but it does present a rather true estimate of things.
Windows 7 still leads the way as a gamer’s preferred OS but Windows 8 market share is certainly catching up. In December 2013, Windows 8 has a market share of almost 22% with Windows 8 (64-bit) and Windows 8.1 (64-bit) contributing almost 11% and 9% respectively.
The OS with the highest growth rate is Windows 8.1 64-bit with 2.52% whereas Windows 8 64-bit fell by 0.95% which makes the growth percentage even more interesting. Even if we assume that all the windows 8 64bit users upgraded to Windows 8.1 64-bit, even then Windows 8.1 grew by almost 1.57%.
Similarly, Windows 8 32-bit fell by 0.05% with a corresponding increase in Windows 8.1 of 0.08%. The 32-bit versions of Windows 8 have a combined market share of almost 1% which is understandable due to the fact that 32-bit systems can only use a maximum of 4GB RAM.
So I guess Windows 8 is not that of a failure as people claim it is, or is it?
What do you think about this news? Let us know in the comments below.
