>>>2% upgrading from WinXP choose Win8. 69% choose Win7.
>
>There's no real point upgrading any more. People forget Windows for Workgroups brought local networking and file sharing- which really was something. An earlier iteration brought trutype which was massive- enough reason all by itself to buy Windows. Windows 95 brought long file names, 32-bit, multi-threading, cool CD Roms and multimedia, plug and play, task bar and much better connectivity- all features that we take for granted today but caused people to camp outside stores to be first to buy. Windows 2000 and XP brought some useful mostly technical stuff, but by now people weren't queuing to buy as readily as they did. Nobody queued for the newer OS. Windows 8 is a non-event for most unless somebody made you take it on a new PC. For corporates, it's the same reason you don't upgrade the flat-bed truck every 3 years: unless the new model does something compelling to pay for the cost of change, you keep the asset going as long as it remains financially feasible. There was a time when other vendors co-operated to force change by not having drivers for older OS but that contrived situation mostly is gone now too.


That's the point. These are forced upgrades. WinXP is at end-of-life April 8, 2014. These corporations are forced into upgrading with PCs that will go more than a year out. And when they do, about 70% are going with Win7. Hardly any are going with Win8. The remaining 29% are presumably going with other versions of Windows, or switching to other forms of hardware (tablets, mobile devices), or something like Macs or LInux-based machines.

The poll was conducted by Dell on 273 IT Enterprise companies.

In short: Win8 is a flop in retail and Enterprise spaces. The bulk of the reason it has any sales at all is because people don't really have a choice. When you go to Best Buy or some online retailer to buy a new piece of hardware (desktop, laptop), it likely has as its only option Win8 pre-installed.

If all new hardware offerings came with the option of WinXP, Vista, Win7 or Win8, and all were going to be actively maintained by Microsoft, I'd be surprised if WinXP and Win7 sales didn't outpace Win8 sales at least 15:1 if not more. I could be wrong.