Windows 10's market share creeps upwards

In spite of Microsoft's desperate scare-mongering, and even-more-desperate tactic of resuming the free giveaway of Windows 10, their new OS has managed to tick upwards by slightly less than 1%, according to new stats from NetMarketShare.

Just to recap, these were last month's stats:

And these are this month's: 

Windows 8.1 remained unchanged, while Windows 7 ticked downwards; Windows XP ticked upwards very slightly, but that's probably just noise in NMS's data, rather than actual gains. Interestingly, MacOS and Linux are both up a bit, although it remains to be seen whether those are real gains that will persist into next month, or just transient blips.

So, what does it all mean?

With Windows 7 and 8 no longer available, their share of the OS market should be going down steadily, even if only from attrition, i.e. as old PCs wear out and get replaced with new ones. Windows 8.1 was showing steep decline until this month, but seems to have stabilized; Windows 7, which was the target of Microsoft's scare-mongering last month, seems to have declined slightly, but only slightly, and still holds 47% of the global desktop/laptop OS market.

Perhaps most tellingly, Windows 10's market share did not increase as much as Windows 7's decreased, with Linux and MacOS also making gains. It would seem that some people were indeed scared away from Windows 7... straight into the arms of Microsoft's competitors.

Overall, though, the OS market place didn't change much. Again.

This is a problem for Microsoft, who desperately need for the market place to swing away from Windows 7 and towards their new OS. Every month that goes by with it not happening weakens the narrative that MS are trying to promote: that Windows 10 is a runaway smash hit, and due to take over from Windows 7 and 8.1 any day now. Enterprise customers, in particular, don't seem to be in any hurry to adopt Windows 10, or to buy new PCs, and individual users seem to have dug in with their old OS. Windows 7 is looking more and more like the next Windows XP, something that Microsoft was desperate to avoid.

Meanwhile, every couple of weeks sees a new headline about how Microsoft is adding more bullshit to Windows 10, from taskbar pop-up ads for their own (broken) Chrome extensions, to returning to the practice of reinstalling bloatware on Home users' PCs, even after users have uninstalled it. Their steps in the direction of finally recognizing users' privacy concerns as a valid thing, while welcome, haven't gone nearly far enough yet, and their practice of forcing updates on Home users who serve as unpaid product testers for MS's Pro & up licence-holders shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Windows 10 is a shit product, full of bullshit "features" that no sane user wants any part of, and users are continuing to refuse the switch, especially given that switching clearly costs more than just the purchase price. It doesn't sell itself on its merits, something which Microsoft has tacitly admitted with their scare-mongering and renewed giveaway efforts; as long as that remains true, I don't expect the overall picture to change much, any time soon.

UPDATE:

Predictably, the first few articles covering the new stats focus more on the fact that Windows 10 has finally eked out 25% market share, and less on the overall trends. Even so, they sound like fairly faint praise.

Por ejemplo, betanews' take:

While Microsoft’s unconvincing numbers portray Windows 10 as an unstoppable operating system gobbling up market share, NetMarketShare’s monthly OS usage figures suggests things are going well for Windows 10, but that it will still be a long time before it starts to trouble Windows 7’s continuing dominance.

January proved to be a good month for the new OS, certainly better than December was at least.

Windows 10 went from 24.36 percent share to 25.30 percent globally, a gain of 0.94 percentage points. Making its way on to a quarter of all systems is a big milestone for the operating system, and growing by nearly 1 percentage point is impressive too, especially given that Windows 10 is no longer free.

Windows 7 dropped 1.14 percentage points in January, but it still has 47.20 percent share. If it continues to fall at this rate (which it likely won’t) and Windows 10 continues to grow at the same speed (ditto), then the new OS could potentially overtake the old one by next January. It will be interesting to see if the Creators Update, out in April, helps accelerate Windows 10’s growth at all.

Or Softpedia's:

NetMarketShare has posted the updated market share figures for January 2017, revealing that Windows 10 has indeed increased its share last month.

But at the same time, the same stats indicated that Windows XP adoption is on the rise, even though this operating system no longer receives updates since April 2014.

Specifically, Windows 7 remained the number one desktop operating system last month with a share of 47.20 percent, followed by Windows 10 with 25.30 percent. Windows XP was third with 9.17 percent.

Windows 10, in particular, recorded strong adoption, as its share increased from 24.36 percent the month before, so it improved by nearly 1 percent. At this point, more than 1 in 4 PCs across the world are powered by Windows 10.

Windows 7, on the other hand, experienced a small decline, dropping from 48.34 percent in December to 47.20 percent last month. And while this is indeed a decline, Windows 7 is now at a better level than in July 2016, one year after the introduction of Windows 10.

Doesn't read like the market share juggernaut that Microsoft were claiming, when they released their own stats last week, does it?