The NetMarketShare trends suggest imminent inflection in December then diverge in January

I must confess that I (and numerous other pundits and online panjandrums) interpreted this graph to mean that Windows 7 would surpass XP last month, but that’s not how it turned out. Instead of each line following its long-established trend, numbers for XP actually jumped a little in the period from December 2011 to January 2012, from 46.52% to 47.19%, while the numbers for Windows 7 dipped slightly from 36.99% to 36.40% in the same period. Go figure!

Thanks to the editors at Tom’s Hardware for bringing this to my attention, in their February 2, 2012, story entitled “Report: Windows XP is Still The Dominant OS.” They speculate — and I agree — that still-lagging economies (especially in Europe, sorely best by the Greek debt crisis and the Euro melt-down) can easily account for the recent stall in the XP-to-Windows-7 cut-over that’s been chugging along for the past two years or better. Likewise, they observe that the pending release of Windows 8 in the third or fourth quarter of 2012 will further complicate matters, and should probably cause the trend lines for both of those OSes to decline further and faster.

One thing’s for sure: it’s still impossible to write off Windows XP, and it’s still around in huge and substantial numbers. With the “absolute retirement date” of this venerable OS slated for April 2014, it’s amazing it’s been able to cling to life and major market share for such a long, long, long time!