Surprise market share gain for Windows XP in January

Ageing operating system Windows XP managed to fractionally grow its market share in January despite a mammoth industry campaign to encourage users off the OS.

In December, XP's global share on desktops stood at 28.98 per cent, according to Net Applications, but this month, it rose to 29.23 per cent.

In just a couple of months, Microsoft will end support for XP, and since the one-year countdown began last year, the vendor and its channel partners have strongly urged customers to ditch XP. The software giant even claimed that Windows 8 is six times more secure than XP in an effort to lure people onto its new operating system.

And it seems its Windows 8 adoption campaign has been working, as in January the combined share of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 marginally crept up to 10.58 per cent - compared with 10.49 the month before.

Windows 7 remained the most popular OS worldwide, according to the figures, taking 47.49 per cent of the market, compared with 47.52 per cent in December.

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