Compare May:
to June:
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that Windows 7's 49.05% market share for June is bigger than its 48.57% share for May. That's the bad news. The worse news? Linux is also up, from 1.79% in May to 2.02% in June.
Yes, Windows 10 went from 17.43% in May to 19.14% in June, but that clearly hasn't come at the expense of Win7; it's mostly come from Win8/8.1 (combine, from 11.39% to 10.46%) and WinXP (from 10.09% to 9.78%).
The stats are all from NetMarketShare, which means that this is an apples-to-apples comparison -- the same survey methodology, and the same analytical techniques, and essentially zero chance one of the data sets being somehow biased, in either Win7's or Win10's favour. Not only has Microsoft's heavy-handed GWX push not resulted Win7 users embracing Win10, it's actually resulted in some users rolling back to Win7, or even switching away from Windows entirely.
Does anyone still think that their sudden change of heart on GWX was a purely PR move?
Microsoft's GWX tactics weren't working. The only users who migrated were those who changing from even older versions of the OS (some of whom may have simply bought new PCs), and those who were still using the wildly unpopular Win8, who might well have chosen to switch anyway, given time.
The nightmare scenario for Microsoft here was that Win7 would become the next XP, with users simply refusing to adopt Win10 and sticking with their old OS until 2020 and even beyond. It's looking more and more as if Microsoft's heavy-handed GWX tactics have turned that nightmare scenario into their new reality. Worse, they've now damaged their relationship to those users so badly that simply easing up on the pushing of Win10 isn't going to cut it; Win7 users are digging in, Microsoft be damned.
Which bring us to the multi-billion dollar question for Redmond, "Now what?" How does Microsoft reach out to a user base that MS desperately need to embrace their new OS and business model? Given the extent of the damage already done, and the depth of the distrust with which their customers now regard them, is it even possible for Microsoft to mend those fences?
Betanews caught one more point here, that I'd missed:
NetMarketShare’s usage figures for May showed that Windows 10 had grown by 2.09 percentage points, putting it on 17.43 percent. In June it grew by a respectable 1.71 percentage points, and now has 19.14 percent of the market.
That growth isn’t coming at the expense of Windows 7 however. The aging OS actually grew share by 0.48 percentage points and it’s sitting on 49.05 percent of the market. That’s the second month in a row Windows 7 has gone up not down. At this rate it might be a while before NetMarketShare shows Windows 10 catching up with Windows 7. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s own figures (which measure base install) that give the new OS 30 percent of the market (with 350 million installs) and show it rapidly closing the gap on the old one.I'd forgotten that Redmond were claiming 30% market share for Windows 10; maybe they're including every new, unsold PC on Earth?