Windows 8 beats Vista's adoption rate in its first year

Microsoft got some good news this week when metrics company Net Applications said Windows 8's user share in August is now larger than Vista's at the same point in the latter's post-launch timeline.

Windows 8's user share of all PCs running Windows, a tally that included Windows 8.1, the update slated to ship next month, jumped to 8.4 percent in August 2013, Net Applications said Sunday. The 2.5-point gain was a single-month record for the struggling operating system, and more than double the previous record set in June.

Ten months after its January 2007 retail debut, Windows Vista—the operating system widely dubbed a flub and a flop—accounted for 7.3 percent of all Windows PCs.

November 2007, the tenth month after Vista's debut, was the first month that Net Applications used a new methodology that weighted data by countries, an attempt to come up with more accurate estimates for markets, such as China, for which it had relatively little data.

Net Applications measures operating system user share by counting unique visitors to some 40,000 websites run by its customers.

:story: PCWorld