It's July the 1st, and you know what that means... time to check in on NetMarketShare, and see what June hath wrought, as far as Windows 10's market share is concerned. Spoiler Alert: Not much has changed.
When last we checked, the OS landscape looked like this:
One month later, the picture now looks like this:
And the trend lines look like this:
Yep... still flat.
Windows 7 did dip slightly, from 49.46% to 49.04%, but that doesn't reverse all of its gains from the previous month, and is starting to look like just noise in the data - Win7 has been oscillating back and forth like this for months, now, but hasn't dipped below 47.01% in the past year; 49.04% is almost exactly where it was at the end of June 2016 (49.05%), so it would seem that (a) Windows 7's user base really is well and truly dug in, and (b) that they comprise just under half the OS market overall, and about 54.99% of the total Windows market.
Windows 10, meanwhile, managed a feeble 0.02% gain (from 26.78% to 26.80%), putting it pretty much exactly where it was the previous month. Other gainers for June included Windows XP (from 5.66% to 6.94%), which didn't quite manage to get back to 7% but came pretty close, and Linux (from 1.99% to 2.36%). Windows 8 (-0.22%), MacOS 10.12 (-0.10%), and "Other" (-0.58%), posted losses, but "Other" was the only category to show a change of more than ±0.5% (the "noise" threshold), and all of them are looking more like fluctuations than trends at this point.
The "Other" category, BTW, appears to consist mostly of older MacOS versions, and has been steadily declining for the last year, from 13.66% a year ago to only 7.33% now, a period over which MacOS has generally lost market share to Windows' combined versions (with Windows gaining 1.72%, and MacOS losing 1.75%, since last July). Windows' dominance on the desktop is still secure.
That's about it, though, as far as good news for Microsoft. Their hopes for the future have been pinned entirely to Windows 10, and Windows 10 is completely stagnant, for yet another month. The much-predicted Enterprise migration to 10 has failed to materialize yet again, and another month of scare-mongering by Microsoft's apologists about malware vulnerability in XP and 7 has resulted in XP recovering some of its previous month's losses while 7 stands pat. In fact, Windows 7 is looking more and more like the next XP, and with the Universal Windows Platform looking less and less viable as each of these stagnant months limps past, I think it's safe to say that Microsoft's Windows 10 strategy isn't working.
Small wonder, then, that we're seeing rumours of a possible name change starting to make the rounds, but I have the feeling that Microsoft will need more of a plan B than that. So far, though, there's no sign of one.
UPDATE:
It looks like I slept better than normal last night, because betanews' Wayne Williams beat me to the punch:
According to NetMarketShare’s figures, Windows 10’s share of the desktop operating system market remains pretty uninspiring, with growth much slower than you’d expect.
In fact in a year, the new OS has grown by just over 5 percent. In comparison, Windows 7 grew by 2 percent in the same time frame.
Of course, this is usage share, rather than market share, but in some ways that’s more important as it shows the percentage of people actually using the different operating systems.
[...]
Will July be any kinder to Windows 10? We’ll find out in a month’s time.
We don't actually need to wait a month for the answer that question; unless Microsoft change course significantly, July is going to play out just like June did, and as May did before that, and April before that, and so on, and so on, and so on. Windows 10 is the only available choice for new PCs, so it's market share (and usage share) will continue to creep upward, but Microsoft really need for Windows 10's upward movement to happen faster than a creeping pace - that's the whole point of giving it away for free, after all, something that they're still doing, in spite of having officially ended the free giveaway almost a year ago.