I was expecting Windows 10's update problems and privacy issues to have an impact on its market share. With adoption by home users slowing after the end of Microsoft's free "upgrade" offer, and with adoption by business of Pro and Enterprise versions also reported to be lacklustre, I was expecting Win10 to gain basically nothing in terms of market share; maybe there would be a slight uptick for Win10 as the market shares of Win8 and XP continue to decline, but I expected that Win7 would continue to be #1, with a market share number that was basically unchanged from August.
Well, NetMarketShare's latest desktop OS market share numbers are now posted, and Win8 and WinXP both showed the expected slight downticks, while Win7 remained the #1 desktop OS, but that's the end of the list of my met expectations. Because Win10's market share actually ticked down in September, from 22.99% to 22.53%, while Win7's share rose from 47.25% to 48.27%. Linux also gained a bit, rising from 2.11% to 2.23%.
For the record, this was August:
And this is September:
BetaNews' reaction to this was... priceless, really:
WTF? Windows 10 now actually losing market share
By Wayne Williams
It was expected, that once Windows 10 stopped being free, upgrades would slow significantly. That turned out not to be the case last month when NetMarketShare’s usage figures showed it, rather surprisingly, to be business as usual. Growth in August was no different from growth in previous months, although I speculated it might have been buoyed by sales of new back to school PCs.
In September though, according to NetMarketShare, Windows 10 didn’t just show slower growth, it actually went into reverse gear and lost usage share. Yes, you read that right.
According to the figures, Windows 10 went from 22.99 percent globally, to 22.53 percent, a drop of 0.46 percentage points. It’s important to remember that NetMarketShare measures usage (people actually using the operating system, rather than having it installed), and that isn’t a precise science. Even so, Windows 10 losing share is a big surprise. When Windows 8.x did it two years ago, it came after months of dwindling growth. Here, NetMarketShare is showing us a healthy growing operating system coming to a dramatic and sudden stop, and then actually rolling backwards a bit. Are the figures to be believed?
Well, while it wouldn’t be the first time that NetMarketShare has released usage numbers and then revised them a few days later, rival usage share monitoring firm StatCounter has similar findings.
Remember earlier this week, when Microsoft announced that Windows 10 was now running installed on over 400 million devices, a claim which I described as lying with statistics? There's a reason why I reacted that way.
Now, to put this in perspective, we're talking about a market share dip of only 0.46% for Win10, which is not enormous; Win7's gain, though, is 1.02%, and a full percentage point gain in market share for the OS which Microsoft clearly wants to phase out as quickly as possible is almost certainly not the sort of news that Microsoft wanted to be met with, at this point in their new OS's rollout. Windows 7 really does look like it's going to be the new Windows XP, with an ardent base of devoted users who simply refuse to switch, regardless of what Microsoft's PR team say about Windows 10's benefits.
The fact that those benefits include numerous items of dubious value, and an update regime which is producing nothing but negative news and bad headlines, is clearly not helping Win10's cause, here, and the enterprise users that Microsoft was hoping to lure to the new OS appear to be staying on the sidelines. With sales of new PCs continuing to decline, the fact that OEMs won't be able to sell Win7 or Win8 PCs anymore likely won't give Win10 much of a boost, either; in fact, I fully expect to see Win7's market share tick up again in October, as consumers take advantage of the last opportunity to buy a Win7 PC, running their OS of choice on the best hardware available while the option is still open.
How badly did Microsoft bungle their free OS giveaway? How much long-term damage have they done to their reputation and brand? We're still waiting for the full picture to form, but it's becoming increasingly clear that their heavy-handed GWX campaign was a serious mistake, and caused serious and lasting damage to Windows 10's future. Unless Microsoft are able to fix Win10's privacy and technical issues, and get a handle on quality control of Win10's update process, and quickly, the situation could easily get even worse.
And all that doesn't even start to deal with Win10's various legal and regulatory issues, with all of it resulting from Redmond's own unforced errors. Prior to this, if you'd told me that a company could seriously damage their own long-term prospects with a free giveaway of a new product, I wouldn't have believed you, but here we are, with Microsoft continuing to make matters worse by doing that thing which all corporations now do, where they refuse to admit error, refuse to apologize for bad behaviour, and continue to spin failure as success in PR copy while sticking with the corporate strategy that landed them in the shit.
Windows is still the dominant OS in the desktop/laptop space, and Microsoft is still a giant company, so they both can continue to sustain this sort of slow bleeding for a long time yet, but Windows 10 isn't their first OS to have issues; Windows 8 was an absolute failure, and Windows Vista didn't do well, either. Windows 7 was a success, but that's starting to look like an outlier, rather than business as usual, with no sign that Microsoft know how to turn things around, or even that they realize there's still a need to turn things around.
What a mess. I feel like I'm watching a slow-motion train wreck: I know that I should turn away, but I just can't. And while it still feels icky to be cheering for failure, I can't help but feel that Microsoft has earned every bit of the trouble that they're currently facing.