Support for Windows XP ends next week. Updates and technical assistance for the operating system will already be unavailable on April 8th. We've known this date was coming since April 2011. Even so XP still has a sizeable share of the desktop operating system market - and it shows no sign of rapid decline.

Microsoft is intransigent. However much, and however many, "ordinary" users want to continue to use Windows XP, which has proved to be popular over the past 12 years, support is about to end and there have been dire warnings about the risks of continuing to use the operating system. For large organisations, an extended support package is available - at a price.

Given that it takes months rather than weeks or days to migrate from one OS to another you might have expected to see a steady decline in XP's share of the desktop operating system market over the past six months. This hasn't happened. In fact, as the latest statistics from NetMarketShare reveal the trend since October 2013 has been more-or-less flat - with a slight increase in its share in each of January and February. 

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So while XP is not at its lowest ever level but it is still only 1.3 percent lower than at the end of December 2013 and  3.7 percent lower than at the end of Spetember 2013.

The position at the end of March is that XP still has 28% of the entire desktop operating market, which is over 30% of the Windows market. Windows 7 has 54% but even combined Windows 8/8.1 only have 12%. Vista hangs on in the mix with 3%, but I doubt anybody will be upset when it reaches its end of support in three years time, on April 11th, 2017.