One Year Later: Windows 10 Now Runs On Over 21% of All Desktops (winbeta.org)

An anonymous reader writes: On June 29, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 was running on 350 million devices -- 50 million more devices than the previous milestone announced by Microsoft on May 5. While the company is expected to update the number of devices running the latest OS when it releases the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on August 2nd, NetMarketShare has decided to conduct some research on its own. According to its report, Windows 10 currently runs on a 21.13% desktop OS share. Meanwhile, Windows 7 continues to dominate the market with a 47.01% share, with Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 representing less than 10% of the PC market, and Windows XP representing 10.34%. While the market share of Windows 10 is all but certain to rise, it likely won't rise as fast as it did between May and June or June and July for example, as Windows 10 is no longer offered as a free upgrade for PCs running Windows 7 or Windows 8. Microsoft has even backtracked on its original statement that Windows 10 will hit one billion devices by mid-2018, saying last month that Windows 10 likely won't in fact make that deadline.

Comments

21% less 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Less one as of last night... :)
Someone's W7 became W10 against their will, and they asked me to install a Penguin instead.
More and more of these as the days roll on.
My bet is Satan Nutella only counts up, not down. Hopefully when they look again only 2.1% are fool enough to still be running Spyware 10.

Re:21% less 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's W7 became W10 against their will, and they asked me to install a Penguin instead.

I can't administrate Windows 10 anymore. I have to install Linux on people's computers now.

This isn't like Mac, where things are named differently, or put in different places. At least there you still get a dialog box, or set of drop downs or radio buttons or whatever and can still fiddle with things. Even on Mac, the computer has settings, things are somewhere and you can figure out what to do eventually.

Windows 10 is becoming unconfigurable. There are now two control panels. The usual control panel, which increasingly has a lot of stuff taken out, and a Metro/charm based "Settings" panel which works like the worst, most uninteractive mobile app interface you have ever encountered. I went into Windows Update (moved entirely to what I will call "Charm") to try and turn off various updates. In effect, there was nothing to click on. Hyperlinked text did nothing, there were not radio buttons, dropdown lists, checkboxes, nothing. There was bullet pointed text that did....nothing. Most other charm settings were the same. I had never felt so frustrated with a computer since I ditched my Tablet.

I googled online for help with my problem and after the 8th dubious Q&A website with poorly formatted helpdesk checklists instructions, nearly always involving reboots, some unbelieveably obscure KB3839272618192 update, usually for another the version of Windows, and nearly always answered by someone with an Indian avatar for some reason. Nothing worked. I could not find out how to get things to work. Not even registry keys could be changed since I didn't have super-duper-permission and could not figure out how to get them in any reasonable way.

After 3 hours, I came to the conclusion that after 25 years of Windows experience, from DOS and 2.0, to 3.11, to Win 95, 98se, NT and 2000, XP, and 7, .... I can't use Windows anymore. Not Windows 8/10 anyway. All my experience and knowledge is basically useless for this new Operating system. It's as if MS was taken over by some dubious Portland startup with grand plans for an operating system and no idea who Windows users actually are, or what Windows is used for.

I can't do this anymore, so I'm not going to. I've moved several computer novices to linux in the last few years and they did just fine with a browser and email client, and the ability to play movies etc. There's the odd hiccup of course, but for Gods' sake a lot of the people can't even use Windows anymore. Windows. They can't use it; I can't fix it; we're done with it. I suspect this is happening in slow motion all over.

I predict MSFT will be in deep trouble in three years time, when the scale of this slow motion train wreck becomes too big to ignore.

Correlates With Stat Counter

[nateman1352]

The data over at Stat Counter seems to agree:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-monthly-201506-201606

Looks like MacOS and Linux share has remained roughly flat over the last year. Win8.1 use has declined 48.5% and Win7 by 23.1%. Hence Win10's adoption has been at the expense of Win8.1 and to a lesser extent Win7. Overall it seems Microsoft's free upgrade has largely been successful at retaining existing Windows users, but it hasn't won any converts from Apple, and it hasn't slowed down Android at all. They stopped the bleeding, but its not exactly the "threshold" that would return Windows to growth that Microsoft's upper management claimed it would be.

Re:99% of those

[geekmux]

run it unwillingly.

Makes sense. 99% of people don't have a damn clue that OS alternatives exist outside of the not-so-affordable Apple ecosystem.

Not even half as much as Windows 7

[melting_clock]

Not even the tactics that MS used to push Windows 10 as an updates to earlier versions allowed them to beat Windows 7. Giving Windows 10 away was not enough to convince Windows 7 users to upgrade. This shows the OS is already a failure.

Many Windows users really did not like the user interface choices that MS made in Windows 8 and stuck with their preferred interface. Although Windows 10 rolled back some of those mistakes, it created many more to replace them and annoyed users by being sneaky about upgrades. MS has annoyed their customers with recent versions of Windows by no giving customers what they want or trying to turn customers into the product.

I am one of those that is sticking with Windows 7 and we never install the spyware/adware version of Windows that 10 has proven to be. I have already largely to moved to Linux so it will not be any great loss.

Re: 99% of those

[Anonymous Coward]

What year did this happen? Was it a magical year when Windows stopped requiring drivers and Linux was too hard, or are you just bad with computers? Be honest.