It has been a little over two months since Microsoft released its latest operating system, Windows 10, but we can say that the installs were much faster and more abundant in the first month when compared to the second.
That being said, we believe that the upgrade rate is going down, though we may not yet know if it is permanent or not. There hasn’t been a complete survey but data compiled by Net Applications shows as much. The figures also reveal that Windows 10 has now taken over more than 6 percent of the market.
The figures show that the operating system had taken up 5.52 percent of the market in August and in September, it got a jump boost of 1.42 percent points (surprising!) to come to the above 6 percent market share it holds. Though the jump was big, growth has indeed slowed down dramatically, which, to be honest isn’t something new for the folks at Microsoft. Many of its older OS’s have also shared similar fates in the past.
Four weeks into the launch, Windows 10 was installed on over 75 million PCs. Microsoft wants to take this number up to a billion devices running Windows 10 “in two to three years”. The devices here include PCs, smartphones, consoles and other devices, as well.
To give you a brief glimpse, here’s how Windows 10’s predecessors fared a month into release of the latest OS:
- Windows 8 gained 0.04 percentage points to 2.60 percent.
- Windows 8.1 fell 0.67 points to 10.72 percent.
Their total shared market share is down from 13.95 percent at the end of July, to 13.32 percent at the end of September. Their peak market share together was 16.45 percent in May and with Windows 10 available as a free upgrade, the two 8 series Windows have to go down in flames.
- The record breaking Windows 7 tore through the 60 percent market share line in June but we could expect that this was the last time it did that as it also dove down with a massive 1.14 points to 56.53 percent.
The 7 can easily be crowned as Microsoft’s most popular operating system yet and it will surely be a while, if ever, until Windows 10 takes the title from Windows 7. The older OS overtook Microsoft’s previous best, the Windows XP way back in September 2012 and has been on the rise ever since.
- Back on topic, Windows Vista slipped 0.09 points to 1.73 percent.
- Windows XP somehow managed to gain 0.07 points to 12.21 percent.
No large drops here as users of these two OS’s don’t get free upgrades to Windows 10.
All in all, the complete market share now stands as 90.54 percent, WIndows, down by 0.30 points, 7.72 percent Mac OS X, up by 0.19 points and 1.74 percent Linux, up by 0.11 points.
The figures show that Linux has, after a lot of years, finally crossed the Windows Vista line.
