Windows 8.1 closes in on Vista among desktop OS users

(Credit:Net Applications)

Windows 8.1 will soon outscore Vista as the fourth most common desktop OS, according to Web tracker Net Applications.

For December, Windows 8.1 sliced off a 3.6 percent share of all desktop OS traffic recorded by Net Applications. Just a breath ahead, Windows Vista snagged a 3.61 percent share. By the time February rolls around, 8.1 will surely have outpaced the 7-year-old and much maligned Vista.

Combined, Windows 8.1 and Windows 8 snagged 10.5 percent of all desktop OS traffic in December, up from 9.3 percent in November and 9.25 percent in October. A free upgrade to Windows 8 users, Windows 8.1 debuted in June as a preview edition before officially launching in October.

Windows 7 continues to gain more users, capturing a 47.5 percent share last month, up from 46.6 percent in November. And Windows XP continues to lose more of its audience, ekeing out a 29 percent share in December, down from 31.2 percent the prior month.

The distance in Web traffic between Windows 7 and XP will likely ramp up over the next few months. Microsoft has vowed to cut off support for XP starting April 8, 2014. That means no more security patches, bug fixes, or other updates. As such, businesses and organizations have been scrambling to upgrade from XP before the deadline arrives.

Topics: Windows, Consumer software and hardware, Windows 8 Tags: XP, Vista, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows 8.1

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Samsung Stock Closes Down 4.6%, Cutting $8B Off Its Market Value As Investors Worry

Samsung isn’t off to a great start for 2014 – during its first full day of trading of the new year, it lost 4.6 percent of its stock price value, which amounts to a more than $8 billion drop in market value, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The drop is likely attributable to increasing lack of investor confidence in Samsung’s ability to continue to grow its mobile business.

Outlook for the company’s upcoming quarterly results are good – analysts estimate that they will see an increase in profit derived from their mobile business, which is the big powerhouse at the company when it comes to driving earnings. But that increase will be off the pace from the previous quarter, and the fear is that in general Samsung’s ability to continue to see increasing gains in its mobile business has come to an end.

The problem for Samsung comes from a number of developments in the mobile market over the past year. First, there’s the fact that smartphone penetration at the top-end of the market is now pretty wide-reaching, meaning there’s theoretically much less opportunity to sell high-end devices than there might have been previously.

There’s also ample price pressure making its way into the world of smartphone sales. Google’s Nexus devices continue to set examples for high quality hardware at lower, contract free prices, and now Motorola is also offering extreme value for money with the $179 Moto G, and the just-reduced Moto X at $399, a price drop made permanent earlier this week. To compete with Google and Google-owned Motorola on price, Samsung would inevitably find margins on its products lower than usual since budget devices becoming more important drives down mobile profit overall.

Samsung held a conference designed specifically to address the concerns of analysts and investors back in November last year, where it tried to reassure its backers and market watchers that it had the right plans in place to continue growth. However investors seem unconvinced. Its stock price was mostly flat coming out of that event, and both for the last day of 2013 and now the first day of 2014, price has dipped considerably.

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Nokia Closes Out 2013 With 92% Of The Windows Phone Market

The fine folks at AdDuplex have provided Paul Thurrott with an early look at their final Windows Phone market data for 2013, giving us in the public a final look at the key statistics of Microsoft’s smartphone platform’s OEM and device makeup.

The figures are much as they have been all year, only more so. Nokia continues to control the lion’s share of Windows Phone hardware, ending the month up a few points at 92.1 percent (this is a calculation of usage share, tracked through AdDuplex’s network). And the Lumia 520 handset continues to dominate its brethren, with a new high of 39.3 percent share. And that Windows Phone 8 grew against the now-fading Windows 7.x system, with record relative market share of 78.3 percent.

Windows Phone’s 2013, if you had to put it into basic trends, would be that Nokia cleaned up, and its Lumia 520 was the weapon of choice.

Thurrott well describes the current low-ending of Windows Phone (bolding original):

Almost no high-end phones are popular. Worldwide, only the Lumia 920 makes the top 10 list for usage among all Windows Phone handsets, and if you look just at Windows Phone 8 handsets, only two high-end devices make the list: The Lumia 920 and the 925. In the US, there are three: The Lumia 920, 928, and 1020. All the rest are new low-end devices or old devices. The Lumia 1520 phablet doesn’t appear anywhere in this report.

What this means is that the sales momentum that Windows Phone has comes at the cost of per-unit revenue. Margin pressure increases at lower price points. The list of sacrifices that had to be made to produce the Lumia 520 is not small.

So, as we tally what could be the final month in which Nokia rules Windows Phone, it’s important to note that rising unit volume has come at a cost. The Lumia 1020 is a hit among a subset of the technology elite, but perhaps few else.

Can you build a mobile empire on predominantly low-end phones? Apple managed the opposite, so perhaps this, too, is possible.

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