Windows 8 is quite possibly the worst desktop operating system that Microsoft ever released. Since Windows 8 is going up against such all-time flop-a-doodles as Vista and Windows ME, that’s saying something.
And it’s not just me saying that. The marketplace agrees. Look at NetMarketShare’s October 2014 operating system market share numbers. Windows 8 and 8.1 had a combined share of 16.8%. How bad is that? Bad enough to lag behind the long officially dead and buried Windows XP, even after it suffered an unexplainable drop of 6.7% in one month.
Two years into the Windows 8 debacle, what could Microsoft do? Rush out a replacement. And try to distance it from Windows 8 as much as possible by calling it Windows 10 rather than the sequentially logical Windows 9. But when you actually use it, what it feels like is Windows 8.2.