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Windows 10 Gains 14% Desktop Market Share in 2016, Edge Continues to Struggle (petri.com)

Posted by msmash on from the market-share dept.

From a report by long time Microsoft watcher Brad Sams on Petri.com: With 2016 now behind us, we can take a look at how far Windows 10 has come thanks to usage-share with statistics from Net Marketshare. At the end of December for 2016, Windows 10 is installed on roughly 24.5% of devices whereas, at the end of 2015, the OS was only installed on around 10% of machines. During the same period, Windows 7 declined from 55.68% to 48.34%, Windows 8.1 usage dropped from 10.3% to 6.9% and XP dropped slightly from 11% to about 9%. Also, released alongside Windows 10, is the company's new browser, Edge. While the market share of the desktop OS has grown steadily, Edge has not performed as well. At the end of 2015, Edge obtained a market share of 2.79% and at the end of 2016, it has climbed to 5.33%. But, Chrome, which had a market share of 32.33% at the end of 2015 now commands 56.43% of the market. During the same period, Internet Explorer dropped from 46.32% in 2015 to 20.84% in 2016.

11 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. So what? by barrywalker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's still a turd of an operating system.

    The only reason they can show higher adoption numbers is because they FORCED it on people.

    1. Re:So what? by Snotnose · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yup. Win10 uptime is well under a week, figure 3-5 days before a reboot. Typically a reboot that happens while the laptop is closed and your snug in a rug sleeping.
      Got the uptime up to 3-5 days by realizing I could restart Windows Explorer when it crashed, which it does 1-2 days in.
      Win10 is the buggiest, most unreliable PoS I've run in decades.
      Did I mention I "upgraded" from Win 8.1 to 10 because I was installing something, and Microsoft took that millisecond to put up the "Pssst. Hey bud, wanna upgrade?". I clicked yes but Microsoft changed what "yes" meant on me.
      Games. Gotta quit playing games and put Microsoft into the categories of toilet paper I've wiped my ass with, then flushed and forgot.
      Why the fuck to I have to put HTML formatting into posts here? I can't just hit CR twice, I have to enter between paragraphs. Really?

    2. Re:So what? by gweihir · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

      Personally, I will not move to Win 10 before I can block updates indefinitely and I can turn off spying ("telemetry") reliably. If that does not happen, then I will go to one gaming-only Win10 machine, no email, no browsing, no non-gaming uses at all, and a Win7 VM for Office with no network connection on a Linux basis. Everything else will be Linux, which I use for a lot of work already anyways.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:So what? by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

      I think it's more likely that 15% was gained during the most egregious cases of Microsoft pushing it really hard on windows 7 users (i.e., clicking the red X doesn't cancel the upgrade, or outright removing the red X) and doing other dirty tricks that are quite mean to their customers, like upgrading without any prompt at all and then you can't cancel until 10 is already installed and running where it shows you an EULA, then after you refuse the EULA it downgrades back to 7. Each operation is quite dangerous for the typical PC user because when things go wrong, (and they do) they usually can't fix it, or even be able to google a fix. But, Microsoft doesn't see a problem with that, as it went on all throughout the first half of the year. After that was over, the quarterly gains Windows 10 saw were very tiny, usually 0.5% +/- 0.15%

      It will probably take two years or so before 10 sees a 30% market share, it will likely be until 2020 that it sees 7s current market share.

  2. So... after a year of ... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful
    giving away Windows free of monetary cost, and using what seemed to be malware-like tactics to trick Microsoft customers into installing Windows 10 even if they did not want to, Window 10 has less than a 25% marketshare?

    .
    Surely this cannot be seen as a success, even by the rose-coloured glasses that Microsoft PR usually looks through.

    It is a colossal failure.

    1. Re:So... after a year of ... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ...seriously...

      Seriously... when Microsoft has to change the fundamental operations of Windows UI controls, going against the published guidelines of how those controls should work, the users are not "too fucking stupid" when they expect Windows controls to operate as they always have operated.

      From the linked article:

      ...Last week, Microsoft silently changed Get Windows 10 yet again. And this time, it has gone beyond the social engineering scheme that has been fooling people into inadvertently upgrading to Windows 10 for months. This time, it actually changed the behavior of the window that appears so that if you click the “Close” window box, you are actually agreeing to the upgrade. Without you knowing what just happened....

  3. Re:I want to believe by amiga3D · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Firefox is still usable. I don't care for a lot of the changes but I still find myself having to shift back from Chrome occasionally. I looked at Edge on a Win10 setup and I figure I'd have to install Chrome and Firefox if I had Win10.

  4. Re:What percentage? by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...Nadella's Microsoft isn't really about Windows and Office any more....

    I would agree. With a caveat.

    It's not about Windows anymore. But Office may still be in the picture.

    Office is the stranglehold that Microsoft has on its corporate victims. The future of Microsoft is Azure, but Microsoft needs to keep Office around to force its customers to stay with Azure instead of another cloud provider.

    If Microsoft can lure customers to Azure without the lock-in of Office, then maybe a Windows-less Microsoft has a reason to be profitable in the future.

  5. Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great. by justthinkit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And when someone wakes up to find Windows 10 installed over their Windows 7/8/8.1 setup, doesn't that mean that their previous Firefox/Chrome default has now been changed...against their will? So most of this market share "gain" is really an attack, disruption or theft.

    --
    I come here for the love
  6. Re:Downgrading to Windows 7 by Waccoon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Haha... there's always some asshole that can't resist blaming the user. If the task manager can't tell you which process is using all that CPU time, I'm pretty sure that's a deficiency in the design of the OS. What do you do when the Windows Modules Installer (ie, TrustedInstaller) is using all that CPU time? Blame Realtek, apparently.

    Next you'll insist that if WindowsUpdate uses up 100% time on one of your cores for 30+ hours, that's user error as well! That, despite this being a VERY well known problem for many years and the only solution is to manually hunt for and install the "right" KB update to update the Windows catalog file. Which KB update? Who knows? It changes every few weeks or so, so go to the MS forums and ask everyone else what magic patch to install.

    One of my biggest problems with Windows10 is that its behavior, particularly with regards to background maintenance, is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it'll idle for a day without using any CPU time at all, and then it thrashes the CPU and storage drive like crazy for the next 10 hours. Despite Microsoft's claim that Win10 only performs background maintenance when your machine is at idle, my experience has proven that's total bullshit. The OS does what it wants, and being a black box by design, go ahead and tell me what the machine is doing with that 10 hours of CPU time.

    Then there's the lovely fact that configuration settings can just change for arbitrary reasons. If you defer updates too many times, the OS will lock out the config setting that lets you defer updates. Yes, it will literally just grey the UI out so you can't change it anymore. With so many hidden gotchas going on in the background trying to protect you from yourself (or prevent you from having any control over your PC), I'd image this makes Win10 practically untestable. How do you diagnose a system that just changes its own configuration willy-nilly? No wonder it's buggy as fuck and settings just reset to the defaults after certain updates (but only for some people and not others). The only way to diagnose a problem is to reinstall and cross your fingers.

    MS built an OS where you don't know what's going on. Clearly, that's why you know it's always user error, and not bad design, that's the problem.

  7. Re:What percentage? by Raenex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We've been telling people for decades that Microsoft cannot be trusted

    They took it to a whole 'nother level with Windows 10 fuckery. Honestly, while Microsoft has always been ruthless against competitors, they generally used to treat their customers with at least some modicum of respect.

    Things started going downhill as the computing landscape opened up to more aggressive tactics driven by software that treated their users as the product.