Google Windows 8. Go ahead, I’ll wait. See anything remotely positive about Microsoft’s brand new OS? Of course you didn’t. That’s because Windows 8 hasn’t sold nearly as well as Microsoft had intended it to whenever they initially decided to change everything that was fundamentally Windows about Windows.
Starting from the initial outcry of, “where’s the start button?!” to further anguish over the layout of the start screen, Microsoft users world-wide have bashed this new iteration of the Windows brand for a while now, even before the operating system officially hit shelves.
Further evidence of Windows 8’s poor performance can be found if one were to search for a simple usage share of operating systems. Windows 7 holds the top spot, with 47% of all computer users running some iteration of the mega-popular OS. Then there’s Windows 8, which holds a measly 10.58% of the usage share-itself. Compare this to Windows XP, yes, Windows XP, the operating system that’s about 15 years old now and one that Microsoft plans to end support for in less than 2 months and the numbers are even more telling, with 29% of all PC owners running XP. That’s right, a 15 year old Operating System currently has 3x the user-base of Windows 8. Microsoft can spin Windows 8’s success all they want, but at the end of the day, numbers don’t lie.
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However, is Windows 8’s poor showing really its fault? Or can it be contributed to something else, something that, regardless of how amazing Windows 8 may or may not have been, would’ve still hampered any chance it had of performing at the level of Microsoft’s previous release in Windows 7? I’m here to argue why, even without the many critiques the general public and critics at-large seem to have about Windows 8, it would’ve done just as poorly as it already has.
There’s one thing no one can deny, and that is the amazing success of Windows 7. Microsoft’s answer to a poor showing by Vista, Windows 7 reaffirmed the company’s dominance over other operating systems by performing better than any prior or since. I can remember whenever it first came out, there were even local businesses dedicated to installing boot-leg copies of the OS on Vista computers for a fee below that of what the OS would have otherwise cost if one were to pay retail price. Needless to say, it’s done very well ever-since. However, if one were to look at Microsoft’s history of operating systems as a whole, a pattern begins to emerge.
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Starting with operating systems that utilized the desktop, we had Windows 95, one of the most successful operating systems of all time. Allowing people to actually use a desktop, something sorely missing in Windows 3, fans flocked to its desktopy goodness.
Following in its wake was Windows 98, which few people who ran Windows 95 seemed to care about since the two were virtually identical, causing it to perform much worse than Microsoft would have otherwise liked. Not one to worry, Microsoft decided to shake things up a bit with their next release.
Enter Windows XP, a massive success, the breakthrough OS that many people, as mentioned above still use today, 15 years later. Everything about Windows 98 that people found to be uninteresting was remedied with this new iteration of the Windows platform.
Next, unfortunately was Windows Vista, still a topic of interest among tech nerds to this day as they discuss all the various intricacies that make it so terrible. From the bloatware, to the incessant administrator requests, to the slow speeds, everything people loved about Windows XP they hated in Vista.
But all that was forgotten as soon as Microsoft released Windows 7, the most used operating system in the world and the most successful of all time, it seemed to erase any bad memory that people previously had about the evil Vista and its horrible reputation for destroying the lives of everything in its path. It seemed at this point that Microsoft’s future could only get brighter. That is, until Windows 8 hit the market.