Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Yosemite adoption does in four days what took Windows 8 two years

Cloud backup company Backblaze recently ran some numbers comparing adoption rates between OS X Yosemite and Windows 8, and they came out with some astounding figures. Within just four days of its release, OSX Yosemite had reached a 21 percent adoption rate among Backblaze users. As for Windows 8, the company reports that it took nearly two years to reach the same figure.

The Yosemite redesign brought a long awaited visual refresh to OS X, while Windows 8's redesign was generally panned by users of Microsoft's OS. It is important to note that these statistics are sampled specifically from Backblaze users, however users of cloud backup services are typically more likely to update to newer operating systems sooner. Still, if these numbers are an indicator, Apple's free update model seems to have been a boon for Yosemite's adoption rate as a whole.

As for why the numbers are so skewed, Backblaze offered up some ideas of their own:

  • Windows computers tend to be more locked down in corporate environments, disallowing users to upgrade the operating system.
  • Windows 8 has had a lukewarm reception in general, and Backblaze's statistics reflect that.
  • Yosemite is free and has the same minimum requirements as its predecessor Mavericks which had the same as its predecessor Mountain Lion.
  • Windows users tend to replace their operating system when they replace their computer hardware, so updates are fewer and farther between.
  • Apple offered a free public beta of Yosemite to general users; the first time they've had a public beta of Mac OS X since 10.0 in 2000. Betas for previous versions of Mac OS X were only available to developers.

What do you think of these numbers? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Backblaze








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