Microsoft ended the free Windows 10 upgrade offer on July 29, admitting that it could miss its goal of bringing the new operating system on 1 billion devices by FY2018. But despite this, adoption of Windows 10 is still going well, according to third-party data.
StatCounter figures for the month of September indicate that Windows 10 is close to reaching 25 percent market share, which means that it’s currently running on nearly 1 in 4 PCs worldwide.
This is an important achievement for an operating system launched one year ago, but on the other hand, when looking back at how aggressive Microsoft became at certain moments, this market share is a little below expectations.
While it’s very clear that hoping to overtake Windows 7 in just one year after launch was clearly mission impossible, Microsoft should be pleased with how Windows 10 performed until now, especially because its growth continues these days.
Windows 7 still number one
At this point, however, Windows 7 continues to be the leading choice in the PC market with a share of 39.38 percent, but it experienced quite a substantial drop in the last 12 months. In the weeks prior to the launch of Windows 10, Windows 7 was running on around 60 percent of PCs worldwide, so the arrival of this new version clearly had a strong impact on its share.
And the same declining trend is likely to continue in the coming months because enterprises are also migrating to Windows 10, as they complete the piloting phase in their networks.
The good news is that Windows XP is also collapsing and is now at 5.46 percent, but there’s no doubt that it’ll continue to be around for a little while longer. Windows XP is nearly 15 years old, but it remains one very popular choice for users across the world.
Windows 8.1 is down to 8.5 percent, while Windows 8 dropped even more to 2.31 percent. Mac OS X is the third desktop OS worldwide with 10.08 percent.
