cryptogon.com

The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That’s the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update.

The problem is that a significant chunk of the world’s PCs continue to run the aged OS, and with just months to go, a seemingly impossible task faces those users: Getting off the 12-year-old XP and onto something newer.

According to analytics company Net Applications, 37.2% of the globe’s personal computers ran Windows XP last month. If Microsoft’s estimate of 1.4 billion Windows PCs worldwide is accurate, XP’s share translates into nearly 570 million machines.

But while much digital ink has been spilled on the impending deadline — what one popular Windows blogger called a “coming Windows XP Apocalypse” on Tuesday — the truth is that some countries have a bigger headache than others.

In the U.S., for example, 16.4% of all personal computers ran Windows XP in July, or about one in six, Net Applications’ data showed.

But in China, where XP remains king, 72.1% of the country’s computers relied on the soon-to-retire operating system last month, or nearly three out of every four systems. In any XP doomsday scenario, that means China is in a position four times more precarious than the U.S.

And it will get worse for China, not better, as the remaining eight months flip off the calendar.

If one assumes that recent trends in XP’s decline continue, then its share in the U.S. will drop to between 9.1% and 11.1% by April 2014 (depending on whether the forecast is based on the last three months or the last six months, respectively).