“Most Windows users in the U.S. know about Windows 8 but few have immediate plans to upgrade to Microsoft’s newest operating system,” Byron Acohido reports for USA Today.
“What’s more, about one-third of Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP users who are ready to buy a new personal computer say they intend to switch to an Apple product,” Acohido reports. “Those are the findings of an unusually broad survey of Windows PC users conducted by antivirus company Avast and released exclusively to USA Today.”
Acohido reports, “On Oct. 25, the day before Windows 8 officially went on sale, Avast polled 1.6 million users of its PC anti-virus product, and got 350,000 responses, including 135,329 from U.S. Windows users. Some 65% of U.S. users replied from PCs running Windows 7, while 22% still used Windows XP and 8%, Windows Vista… Avast’s poll of U.S. Windows users found 16% planned to purchase a new computer. While 68% indicated they would get one of the new Windows 8 models, 30% planned to buy an Apple iPad touch tablet, and 12%, an Apple Macintosh computer.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we predicted quite some time ago:
Our initial impression is that Microsoft, in trying to cram everything into Windows 8 in an attempt to be all things to all devices, will end up with an OS that’s a jack of all trades and a master of none (which, after all, ought to be Microsoft’s company motto)… We simply do not see the world clamoring for the UI of an iPod also-ran now ported to an iPhone wannabe that nobody’s buying to be blown up onto a PC display.
From what we’ve seen so far, Windows 8 strikes us as an unsavory combination of Windows Weight plus Windows Wait.
Not to mention that probably no one on earth knows how much or what kinds of residual legacy spaghetti code roils underneath it all (shudder)… No matter what, if Microsoft’s going to ask Windows sufferers to “learn a whole new computer” (and that’s exactly how they’ll look at it, regardless of how Microsoft pitches it), millions will simply say, “Time to get a Mac to match my iPod, iPhone, and iPad!”
As if they needed it: More good news for Apple. – MacDailyNews Take, June 6, 2011
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David G.” for the heads up.]