You’ll have to pry Windows XP out of their cold, dead hands, apparently.
As support for Windows XP ended last month, all those efforts by Microsoft to get users to upgrade to new versions of Windows had barely an impact on actual usage, according to new numbers released by the Net Market Share research service.
Windows XP’s worldwide market share came in at 26 percent for April, down just 1.5 percentage points from the previous month.
Usage of Windows 8.1, Microsoft’s newest operating system, rose by 1 percentage point to nearly 6 percent market share, according to the Net Market Share numbers. Windows 7 rose by half of a percentage point, to just over 49 percent.
The numbers illustrate how entrenched Windows XP has become, particularly at some companies and large institutions. They also help to explain why Microsoft begrudgingly decided to include Windows XP among the versions that received a patch this week for a high-profile security flaw in Internet Explorer.
Here’s a look at the trend over time.
