Windows 10 has over 50 percent market share, according to Microsoft -- wait, what?leading to this story, on betanews:
and immediately suspected that it was horse shit. Which was also my reaction on seeing this story, from Softpedia:NetMarketShare’s desktop operating system usage figures are due out in a couple of days, and what happens in terms of Windows 10 growth will be interesting as it will be the first time the new OS isn’t available for free.Before those figures arrive however, Microsoft has released some of its own, and according to the software giant Windows 10 now has 50 percent of the market in the US, and 51 percent in the UK. And, as if that wasn’t surprising enough, those numbers are from June, so the current percentage will likely be much, much higher.
Windows 7 Drops Below 40 Percent Market Share for the First Time
Windows 10’s growth continues, eating from Windows 7’s share
Microsoft hasn’t provided us with updated figures on Windows 10 adoption, but a new set of market share figures from StatCounter show that Redmond’s new operating system continued its growth in August, and what’s more, it substantially impacted Windows 7’s market share.Yes, that's not just one, but two different tech writers, both of them claiming that Windows 10 has gained market share at Windows 7's expense, in both cases without having seen any actual evidence of this. This is how hype happens.
Well, today is the first day of a new month, which means that NetMarketShare will have released new numbers on what's actually happening in desktop OS market share. Let's take a look, shall we?
To recap, this was June:
This was July:
What do the numbers actually show? Let's let Sean Chan at MSPowerUser break it down for us:
The latest report is pretty similar to the recent reports, which shows growth for Windows 10. Last month, we reported that Windows 10 had a market share of 21.13% in 1 year. Now, according to NetMarketShare, the OS now claims 22.99% of the market, gaining 1.86% of the market in just a month. Windows 10 is still the second most used desktop operating system, and that’s not surprising to see as a lot of users are still running Windows 7. In fact, Windows 7 also gained a tiny of market share in August — 0.24% to be exact.
On the other hand, some people are finally moving away from Windows XP — the OS now claims 9.36% of the market, which is still quite a lot. However, the OS claimed 10.34% of market share back in July which means it lost 0.98% of market share in August. For an OS that’s 15 years old, 9.36% market share is still pretty impressive and scary at the same time since Microsoft is no longer providing support for the OS.
As for some of the other operating system, not much has changed over the last month. For example, OS X 10.11 still claims 4.38% of the market (down from 4.69%), Linux claims 2.11% (down from 2.33%) and Windows 8.1 claims 7.92% of the market (up from 7.8%).So, yes, Windows 10 is gaining users... but slowly. No, Windows 10 does not have 50% of the OS market, or even 50% of the Windows market. No, Windows 10 is still not making gains at Windows 7's expense; actually, both Win7 and Win8 increased their share of the OS market. In fact, it looks like most of Windows 10's market share gains came at the expense of XP, something which could easily be explained by hardware replacement - Windows XP PCs are all old, remember, so their share of the market will continue to dwindle as those users replace those old machines as they wear out.
All of this continues trends that I've seen reported elsewhere, including slow sales of new PCs which aren't expected to rebound until 2018, slow adoption of Windows 10 by businesses, and the ongoing horribleness of Windows 10 inspiring people to roll back to earlier, better versions of the OS. But Microsoft's transparently dishonest attempts to convince us that Windows 10 is taking the PC world by storm are 100% pure manure.
Never believe the hype. The hype is always a lie.
The one surprising thing about August's numbers were the slight (-0.22%) down tick in Linux numbers. Considering just what a horrible experience Windows 10 is proving to be, and what a bug-ridden cluster fuck the Anniversary Update has been since Microsoft rolled it out, I was expecting to see Linux making gains, or at least holding steady, but it looks like frustrated users are simply retreating to the previous stable Windows versions that they know.
There is, after all, comfort in the familiar; I've been threatening to switch to dual-booting Linux for months, and have even purchased a new HDD to install it on, but haven't actually installed that piece of hardware yet, or the new OS, so I can relate. Windows 7 still works, and should keep working for years yet, so the average user may see no reason to go to all the hassle of installing, and then learning one's way around, an entirely new OS.