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

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.

Comments

So what?

[barrywalker]

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.

Re:So what?

[gweihir]

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.

Re:So what?

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

Would help if Edge actually worked

[snickers]

I've just moved to Windows 10 for work and and Edge just doesn't run on my machine. It opens and then closes straight away. Googling the problem has shown it appears to be affecting a reasonable number of users. I can't be bothered to spend more than an hour trying to fix it.

Re:Would help if Edge actually worked

[SeaFox]

I can't be bothered to spend more than an hour trying to fix it.

Neither can Microsoft, since they let their QA department go. /rimshot

So... after a year of ...

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Re:So... after a year of ...

[QuietLagoon]

...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....

Chrome works

[rsilvergun]

he who lives by the Enterprise Management tool dies by the Enterprise Management tool. More and more I have to put users on Chrome because the numbskulls who manage their domain profiles have cranked IE's security settings so high nothing works. And there are so many esoteric settings buried in the registry good luck finding the one causing your JavaScript to go haywire. But they let 'em install Chrome. So I get to have this conversation a lot:

Me: Does it work in Chrome?
Them: Yes.
Me: Wanna spend 8-16 hours of your life figuring out which of the 800+ settings it could be that's breaking IE?
Them: No.
Me: Use Chrome.

Edge is a POS

[Anonymous Coward]

When I launch a browser I want to start using it immediately, not after it has pestered me about some bullshiat I care nothing about. It is insanely frustrating to have Edge ignore the fact that I am typing a URL and have it take me off to some recommended shiat page telling me how much better Edge is than its competition. Quit trying to sell me on your walled garden web experience and stay out of my way, you imbeciles. Your UI includes a Stop button for a reason. The fact that it doesn't work when you are cramming your shit in my face only serves to piss me off.

I want to believe

[grasshoppa]

I want to believe MS has competent design managers working for them. Maybe they are being micromanaged to the point of irrelevance, but I want to believe that after 20 years of trying to make a decent web browser they'd achieve success...or lacking that, they'd fail because some idiot manager keeps fucking them up.

Because damn...I'm embarrassed FOR them. How do you not put out at least a baseline capable browser by this point? Multi-billion dollar company who's spent 20+ years in the market, and they still fuck it up.

Re:I want to believe

[amiga3D]

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.

What percentage?

[techno-vampire]

What I'd like to know is what percentage of the machines running Windows 10 were stealth upgrades, and how many of those weren't reverted because the users either didn't know that they could go back to their old system or were afraid to try.

Re:What percentage?

[QuietLagoon]

...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.

Re:What percentage?

[Raenex]

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.

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

praising ubuntu and all its back door bullshit shovling all your searches direct to amazon

Since 16.04 LTS, switched off by default. Please try and keep up.

Downgrading to Windows 7

[guacamole]

Downgrading to Windows 7 was the best thing I have done to my desktop.

Windows 10, even a year after its original release, had signs of being a beta product at best. One problem I have been struggling with was the machine's CPU eventually constantly at 30-40% use with no obvious causes. I have tried all of the half-baked canned answers from Microsoft, including disabling/enabling/changing AV, disabling Microsoft services, and even wiping out and reinstalling the OS.

The next issue is with the updater. This damned thing simply eventually stops working. It shows there are pending updates, starts the downloads, but then sits at 0%. I have tried every canned answer provided on the Microsoft forums, including resetting the update components and wiping and reinstalling the OS.

And finally, I am not fine at all with an OS that decides to reboot the machine whenever it likes. It's downright dangerous to leave any work open. I have been caught off guard by reboots a few times.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Waccoon]

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.

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[justthinkit]

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.

But Firefox increased is market share

[afc_wimbledon]

From the figures linked to by the original article, FF went from 11.68% in Jan 2015 to 12.22% in Dec. Hardly users "fleeing" - not what it was, but still comfortably twice anything but IE or Chrome.