Stefan Mileschin

Windows sales are slower than an asthmatic ant with a heavy load of shopping and the word on the street is that Microsoft's business plan might be a bit cracked.

When the new Windows operating system launched at the end of October, Redmond claimed it sold 4 million copies in the first three days of launch. But figures from web analytic company NetApplications said that as of 11 November, Windows 8 has captured 1.04 percent of the global desktop market share.

To put this in perspective, this is the same market share as Linux on the desktop. Even Apple's OS X at nine percent has a bigger share of the market.

According to The Next Web, Windows 7 has 45 percent, Windows XP 39 percent and Windows Vista takes up another 5.4 percent.

To be fair it is early days, but it should be doing a little better.

Numbers are not good for the Windows 8 Touch either. It has only 0.02 percent of the tablet space, slightly better than Windows 8 RT Touch which, statistically, has captured zero percent so far.

This backs up a survey from security firm Avast. According to the survey, 70 percent said they don't plan to upgrade to Windows 8.

While all this suggests that on its first month out the OS is not doing horribly, it is still not doing as well as Microsoft would like. If things do not pick up in the Christmas rush then there could be much soul searching in Redmond.

http://news.techeye.net/software/windows-8-sales-slow