ReadWriteEnterprise

With Microsoft gearing up this year for Windows 8, I thought I would survey the stats on desktop OS share, and to no surprise, XP is still the leader. According to Forrester in March 2011, 60% of the corporate desktops were running XP. The mix is somewhat less on the consumer side: According to NetMarketShare.com, XP has a 46% share as of December 2011. A compilation of other stats on Wikipedia shows between 26-45%, depending on who is counting. Certainly, there is still a lot of XP out in the world, and probably in your home and at your workplace.

So is 2012 going to be the year that we finally tip the balance and have something more recent that a 12 year old OS running on our Windows PCs? Probably not. Even though it has been years since you could actually purchase a copy of XP in any retail store, or buy it pre-installed on a new computer, XP continues to thrive.