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Windows 10 is on over 14 per cent of PCs worldwide

by Mark Tyson on 2 May 2016, 11:31

Tags: Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Windows 7, Windows 10

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The latest figures for desktop operating system market share reveal that Windows 10 market share continued to creep upwards, while trusty old Windows 7 fell beneath a significant market share milestone in April.

NetMarketShare has published its Desktop Operating System Market Share data for April 2016 and you can clearly see, below, that Windows 10 has cemented itself in second place among popular desktop OSes, capturing 14.35 per cent of the market. It's share is not up very much though; in March its reported market share was already 14.15 per cent. Putting a number to these percentages, Microsoft stated in late March that Windows 10 was in active use on over 270 million devices.

In the NetMarketShare desktop OS usage data, which includes not just Windows but alternative OSes such as Mac OS X and Linux, it is also significant that Windows 7 has dropped beneath a certain threshold. April's worldwide recorded usage of Windows 7 dropped beneath the 50 per cent threshold and is now at 48.79 per cent. That's quite a decline since the March 2016 figures were published, showing it held a 51.89 per cent share at that time. We saw last month that among Steam gamers Windows 10 64-bit became more popular than Windows 7 64-bit – that gap has widened this month.

Another notable drop past a significant percentage number was that of Windows XP. In March it clung onto 10.90 per cent of the market but in April that number fell to 9.66 per cent. For an OS that is no longer supported that's a lot of potentially vulnerable machines being clocked by NetMarketShare's web analytics data sampling.

Microsoft will release its free Anniversary Update for Windows 10 this summer which could, given favourable reviews, help boost the adoption of its newest OS. Meanwhile, those still using Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs have until 29th July to take advantage of Microsoft's free upgrade to Windows 10 offer.

HEXUS Forums :: 26 Comments

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Posted by eiamhere69 - Mon 02 May 2016 12:26
Probably due to all the forced updates
Posted by FRISH - Mon 02 May 2016 12:41
That seems pretty bad considering it's a free upgrade currently. While there's obviously been a lot of concerns, it does make me wonder what they could do to bump up its market share of its later OS offerings.
Posted by Corky34 - Mon 02 May 2016 12:45
I wonder why they're reporting Windows NT saw a rise of almost 2.5% and why Windows 3.1 suddenly showed up with a 0.40% share, has there been a big rise in people spoofing what their OS is reported as?
Posted by jag272 - Mon 02 May 2016 12:53
FRISH
That seems pretty bad considering it's a free upgrade currently. While there's obviously been a lot of concerns, it does make me wonder what they could do to bump up its market share of its later OS offerings.

I expect there'll be a surge towards the end of the free upgrade period. I'm personally in the process of planning an upgrade for like end of June, and I'm going to set up a dual boot of windows 10 on the SSD i'm getting to try and adjust too it. If I don't like it, I'll have the free upgrade done and I can cash that in anytime down the line and stick to 7, if I get to like it I'll just use Win10.

I played around with it a bit in a VM and while its not ideal I can get it running mostly how I want it currently (so long as I install 3rd party software to turn off ribbon menus, those horrible beings). In some ways I got 10's layout to be better than 7 for me, primarily because it restores some old win XP functionality and I'm still not a fan of 7, even having used it for 2 years now.
Posted by LSG501 - Mon 02 May 2016 14:12
FRISH
That seems pretty bad considering the amount of pop ups and install me ‘methods’ they're currently using.
Hang on I'll go and correct that for you :)

Honestly I'd say a lot of people don't want to change the os to windows 10, there's plenty of issues still floating around regarding things like updates and the way they're ‘forced onto you’ in the middle of work, the ongoing privacy concerns and the lack of information about how the os is going to ‘change’ later down the line due to the new ‘service’ based approach (ie will there be extra fees etc).

Also I wouldn't be surprised if a high percentage of those still on win 7 are businesses that have just changed to it or slightly more comical, because MS is specifically targeting these types of user, the users who don't update their os automatically or regularly lol.

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