Woeful Windows 8 sales are growing

XP end benefits Microsoft OSes but Win7 may be doing best

Don't expect Microsoft to celebrate the latest operating system market share numbers.

The installed base of the Windows 8 family is growing, and Windows 8.1 either has or is on the verge of passing the first version.

However, Microsoft's touch-screen system is still woefully behind Windows XP and Windows 7, and isn't even close to hitting the maligned Windows Vista high-water mark.

PC vendors entered 2014 anticipating another year of struggles. In 2013, PC sales fell 8.5 per cent as consumers flocked to tablets and smartphones.

The expectation for 2014 was for sales to fall another six per cent, making for three years of decline, and pushing the PC industry to sales levels below 2009.

The dire forecast isn't entirely inaccurate as consumer sales remain down. However, overall PC sales numbers are more or less stable as businesses refresh their aging fleets.

Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard reported increases in PC sales in the first quarter, driven largely by the discontinuation of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system.

In previous operating system release cycles, Microsoft could count on the combination of lengthy enterprise evaluations and discontinuation of support for previous versions coinciding around 18 months after the release of a new operating system.

When this happened, sales of the new version would spike. These are no ordinary times, though, for operating systems.

While Windows 8 is the main benefactor of the Windows XP discontinuation, it's not getting all of the market share shift.

Windows 7, released in 2009, has increased its overall market share by more than five per cent since the release of Windows 8 in 2012, according to global figures from online researcher NetMarketShare.

As of May, Windows 7 commanded more than half of the overall market share installed base.

Since Windows 8 was released for general sales in 2012, its market share numbers have struggled to make a dent in shifting legacy users.

Windows XP market share has fallen from 41 per cent in October 2012 to 25 per cent in May 2014.

Most of those users have gone to Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, but some - presumably business buyers - have shifted to Windows 7 or moved from the Windows platform to alternatives such as Mac or Google Chrome.

The good news for Microsoft is the Windows 8 family continues to expand its market share, following PC and tablet sales, mostly at the expense of Windows XP.

The bad news: Windows 7 is also expanding market share at an equal or faster rate and Windows 8 is nowhere close to passing the high-water mark of the much-maligned Windows Vista, which peaked at 18.7 per cent in 2009.

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