Windows 8.1 has finally bested its predecessor, with its market share edging higher than Windows 8′s in May, according to NetMarketShare. In May, Windows 8.1 ended with 6.35% global desktop market share, while Windows 8 managed a slimmer 6.29%. As The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski notes, that’s an aggregate gain of 0.40% for Microsoft’s new Windows 8.x platform. Here’s a plus, and a minus: While Windows XP’s market share fell over 1% in the month to 25.27%, Windows 7 saw is market share skip past the 50% line. So, it seems that large companies are moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, a shift that Microsoft has encouraged, is material.
May was the seventh full month of availability for Microsoft’s latest operating system version: Windows 8.1 continues to grow slowly while Windows 8 remains largely flat, allowing the former to finally pass the latter in market share. At the same time, Windows 7 has managed to climb back over the 50 percent mark, while Windows XP still has more than 25 percent of the pie, despite support for the ancient OS finally ending in April. The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have gained a combined 0.40 percentage points (from 12.24 percent to 12.64 percent). More specifically, Windows 8 slipped 0.07 percentage points (from 6.36 percent to 6.29 percent), while Windows 8.1 grabbed an additional 0.47 percentage points (from 5.88 percent to 6.35 percent).