"Other," a category which includes Linux, is now the third most popular OS in the market, ahead of Windows XP and Windows 8.1, and MacOS X seems to have stopped losing users to the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft's flagship product, meanwhile, is still not thriving. Adding Windows 7's loss to Windows 10's gain gives a swing of 0.96%; at that rate, assuming it stays constant, it will take eleven more months for Windows 10 to reach parity with Windows 7. That's parity by next fall, even with Microsoft giving Windows 10 away for free, to anyone willing to switch.
Some of the lickspittles in the tech media are, of course, presenting this as some sort of seismic shift in Windows 10's favour.
Por ejemplo, this headline, from WinCentral:
Windows 10 grows to 28%. Mac OS X & Linux market share unchangedWay to round up, there, WinCentral. In an OS market where a month-to-month changes of less than half a percent are the norm, increasing Windows 10's monthly gains by an extra 0.37% is risible.
The article itself is a bit more honest, though:
Windows 10 is at 27.63% at the end of July month. At the end of June, it was at 26.8%. Windows 7 has declined a bit from 49.04% in June to 48.91% in July. Talking of competitors, Mac OS X and Linux share remains almost stagnant in July.
Windows XP declined sharply from 6.94% in June 2017 to 6.1% in July 2017. It never dies!! July report also comfirms [sic] that corporates that still buy and force employees to use Windows 7 and are not really fast in adopting and updating to Windows 10. [Emphasis mine.]Or there's this, from mspoweruser.com:
Windows 10 inches closer to 30% market share as Windows 7 declinesWindows 7 actually declined by about a tenth of a percent, and Windows 10 is nowhere near a 30% share, but why insist on mere facts? There's clickbait to be churned out!
Once again, though, the article itself is a bit more honest:
With Windows 7 still being the top desktop operating system in the world and claiming nearly 49% of the market, there is no doubt that Windows 10’s will get a potential boost once the extended support for Windows 7 ends in early 2020. According to the latest data from Net Market Share, Windows 10 now claims 27.63% of the market, up from 26.80% in June. Windows 7’s market share, on the other hand, went down to 48.91% from 49.04%. Put simply, the latest data from Net Market Share doesn’t really show anything dramatically different, and the changes are pretty usual at this point. [Emphasis mine.]Now, that's closer to the reality: that very little has changed, for yet another month. Windows 7's "decline" is well below my ±0.5% noise threshold; Windows XP declined far more than Windows 7 did, which could be continuing fallout from the WannaCry crisis or could just be a lot of near-20-year-old PCs needing replacement, with Windows 10 as the only available OS option on a new PC bought at retail. If "more than 85% businesses [are] expected to migrate to Windows 10 by the end of this year," as mspoweruser puts it, there's still no evidence of that seismic shift in the usage share data.
Yes, Windows 10's share of the market does seem to be steadily creeping upwards, but it's creeping very slowly for a product which, I'll reiterate, has no competition at retail from other versions of the OS. Windows 10 is still the only game in town, it's still free for those that want to switch, and Microsoft are still having trouble giving it away. Yes, it'll probably get to 30% usage share eventually, and may even reach that figure later this year, but Microsoft have been giving Windows 10 away for free since 2015. The fact that Microsoft still haven't managed to move a third of their customers to a free product is not a sign of strength. Even their most ardent apologists are now admitting that Windows 10 might not really take off until after Microsoft ends support for Windows 7, two more years from now.
And so, another month passes us by, with very little actual movement, and virtually no chance that Microsoft will make any meaningful changes to their approach in an effort to actually sway skeptical Windows 7 users. I expect Microsoft to step on a few more rakes in the coming months, but otherwise look for very little to have changed by the end of August, too.
UPDATE:
Steam's Hardware & Software Survey for July is also available, and it also shows no huge changes. Interestingly, though, the Steam Survey's small changes are, once again, the opposite of what the OS market is doing overall:
Both Windows 7's gain and Windows 10's loss are are larger than the ±0.5% noise threshold, but this is a voluntary survey, rather than a sampling of Steam's traffic, so I'm not at all convinced that it means anything at all. It does show that Windows 10 isn't winning new converts among gamers, though, a group which adopted Windows 10 much more quickly than the broader market, and which are buying new PCs at a significantly higher rate than anyone else.