From Jim Souders at Windows IT Pro:
Why Are Windows 10 Migrations Picking Up Speed?
Last year, few IT professionals believed they would be close to completing their migration to Windows 10 by this time. Some even estimated that they wouldn’t be at the halfway mark. Given the scale of this mission—migrating thousands of systems without business interruption—this conservative outlook is perhaps understandable.
Yet IT experts across major industries and enterprises have found that, while their planning cycles have taken more time than expected, actual system deployments are moving swiftly. In fact, our recent annual 2017 Windows 10 Enterprise Impact Survey of nearly 500 enterprises with upwards of more than 10,000 systems unveiled a tipping point in which nearly 10 percent had already completed their migrations. Many more believe that they will complete the migration within twelve months at the latest.
What changed? What sparked this sudden acceleration of Windows 10 upgrades?There's been an acceleration of Windows 10 upgrades? Really? Well, then I guess the end-of-July usage stats from NetMarketShare and others should reflect this dramatic shift to Windows 10... right? But they won't, will they? Because those usage stats have remained stubbornly flat all year, in spite of apologists like Souders claiming all the while that the rollout was picking up speed, and I'll bet a five spot on this month's stats coming in at pretty much exactly the same place that last month's did.
Remember when we were discussing selection bias, just last week? I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and say that cherry-picking fewer than 500 businesses has not yielded a representative sample of the overall OS market.
IT Pro (and others) seem to be invested in the Windows 10 vision of the future, giving them a material interest in the outcome of those polls. They keep getting the answers they go looking for... only to have the behaviour of the actual market contradict them entirely, month after month after month. I'm not expecting August to be significantly different, or September, or October... and let's face it, if the shift isn't already well underway, a month into the year's 4th quarter, then it won't be happening this calendar year.
We've got just over two weeks to wait, to see if I'm right about that. Stay tuned...