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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.
run it unwillingly.
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.
There's a little known 32-bit release of it that's supported by Microsoft through to 2019.
It's called Windows Embedded POSReady 2009. It's basically an updated version of Windows XP (I guess you could call it SP4?). It still receives security patches weekly via Windows Update. It doesn't require activation and it's not too hard to find on the internet. It comes as a DVD ISO with an updated installer that lets you partition the disks through the GUI and load additional storage drivers graphically (rather than via the text mode setup phase). A full installation is just over 900mb.
I'm running it on my aging T60p, and it works great. It's extremely small and very fast.
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.
"...Windows 10 is no longer offered as a free upgrade for PCs running Windows 7 or Windows 8."
I think what the author meant to say was, "Windows 10 is no longer rammed down the throat any user too naive to treat anything coming from Microsoft as a malware attack."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
if i recall correctly, october is when microsoft will quit allowing factory downgrade options from major oems like toshiba, hp, dell, lenovo. the customer, or even you as a var, can still do it yourself as permitted by the oem/dsp eula, but the systems will have to ship from the manufacturer with win 10 pro installed. i know at dell it's already slim-pickings for downgrades to 8.1 or 7 pro.
Wake me up when it's finished and usable instead of a total mess with two control panels and a requirement to search instead of navigate a menu.
Another reason that businesses are sticking with what works, software that isn't forward compatible.
"4/5ths of people refused a free upgrade to what was traditionally a very expensive piece of software, despite us trying to forcibly install it on their machines for months on end and making it difficult for anyone other than a techy to refuse it".
Amazing how you can change how something reads by just flipping it.
Using the word 'runs' makes me laugh: poetic license in extremis. I have 'upgraded' many of my machines to Windows 10. Let me tell you that it doesn't exactly run so much as crawls in agony until you put it out of its misery by either reinstalling Windows 7, or booting from a device with Ubuntu Studio on it. Then there is all that cortana crap which you can't fscking switch off. I mean, I'd much rather have a simple scriptable way to make menus. Really: I could make something more useful for me with bit of javascript and a host with a few API hooks. It would be quicker than waiting for cortana to wake from its slumber on an older laptop! If you just had a javascript environment with a couple of predefined objects (akin to the window and document objects in a web browser), you could do something perfectly functional, and hack in whatever clever logic you want. What you can't do with MS's bloated mess, however, is hack _out_ the logic and features you don't need.
I would say, as a caveat, that the Linux world still has far to go in making things as easy as they can be. The trouble is that we've inherited a philosophy of design from that of companies where building big opaque piles of incomprehensible and incompatible crap that just about worked happened to be excellent development models for software companies. Short, sweet, beautiful and elegant examples of software programming are rarer than diamonds, and some of those 'rarer than diamonds' are locked in vaults and jealously guarded by organisations whose only purpose on life is to make money.
John_Chalisque
Windows 10 probably will be the last version of Windows, but not the way Microsoft imagines it.
By continuing to nag, snoop, spam and lock-down its users, Microsoft is transforming its core offering - its OS - into the opposite of what it should be: an agent of the owner that compels the computer to obey the owner's intent.
Its the age-old agency problem. An agent with a large amount of power (network effects in Microsoft's case) tends to abuse it to the detriment of the principal (Microsoft users). Its same problem when powerful executives persuade their company to reward them richly without commensurate effort. Left uncorrected, the situation worsens (customers quit in disgust, company implodes, etc).
Another company may eventually do to the Microsoft desktop what Apple and Android did to them in mobile. Or Microsoft may wisen up and curb their worst excesses (as they did in the XBox One phone-home fiasco). But it'd be a hard sell to the MS board and would take a lot of imagination on their part to act more directly in favor of consumers, versus short-term shareholder rewards.
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.
A new MS operating system "offering" a free upgrade from its predecessors, so every single user of a previous OS pretty much had to go out of their way to NOT get it, reaches 20% penetration (and I chose that word deliberately, for the way it tried to "convince" you to install it) after a year.
That is pretty much a declaration of bankruptcy.
The amount of "computer savvy" people isn't that high to warrant this number. It's not just "paranoid geeks" that saw the wiring under the board and didn't want to be infected. This number pretty much means that four out of five people using Win7 or Win8.1 fought tooth and nail to NOT upgrade.
And four out of five people aren't paranoid computer geeks. These are "normal" computer users. My hope is that this is the beginning of people getting a clue about their privacy being at stake.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
how are they managing that, MS no longer license win 7 Pro!
That is wrong. It is even mentioned in the f..ing article that Windows 7 Pro is available to OEMs until October 31, 2016.
80% refuse to use Windows 10 even when it is forcibly given away for free. That's the real story. Microsoft literally tried to force people to use the free upgrade to Windows 10 for a full year and 80% of the market avoided it.
Nice try, bitches. Fuck you!
This message composed and posted from a Linux desktop PC.
79% of PC owners were able to block Windows 10 from being shoved down their throats.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I'm wondering whether this will actually happen. Every business supplier we work with still assumes 7 by default for work machines, and that makes sense because almost everyone I know in business still wants 7. If MS try to strong-arm the likes of Dell and HP into not selling what their customers actually want, I don't know who's going to win, but sign me up for a ring-side seat.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's a big improvement over Win7. I don't understand the hate.
Microsoft decided one UI should work everywhere. WinCE was the Windows desktop put onto phones. Windows 7 was the pinnacle of Desktop UI for Microsoft. Windows 8 was a tablet release, as is Windows 10. No more desktop, they want to compete with the iPad and iPhone.
You know what? The tablet UI works well on a phone. It's great for casual web, email and games. Or really anything you run one at a time like the days of DOS. If you're switching apps or running multiple apps, like the typical office worker, it's not as good. The desktop UI is great there. For a software developer the tablet is going to be harder for most.
Even *Apple*, the one choice no upgrades everything sealed Steve Jobs knows best, offers 2 interfaces. macOS for desktops, iOS for handhelds.
Microsoft needs to stop thinking one size fits all or start offering their core Enterprise apps on other platforms. Outlook (not OWA!), Skype Business, Office and Sharepoint clients for Linux and macOS. Full AD client. If they don't, enterprises will migrate away from AD, Exchange, Sharepoint to something else with a UI that works for their users.