Well, according to this piece at Computerworld, it's looking like the latter:
In April 2014, when Microsoft rescinded Windows XP support, that version accounted for about 29% of all copies of Windows worldwide. Currently, the best-guess for Windows 7 at its end-of-support is a full 10 percentage points higher.
But that's not even the half of it.
In 2012, two years before XP shuffled off the support scene, Computerworld, using the same 12-month trend that produced a 39% user share for Windows 7 in January 2020, figured that XP would have a mere 17% in user share at retirement. The fact that Computerworld's back-of-the-envelope forecast for XP was off by 12 percentage points does not make for much confidence in the 39% mark for Windows 7 in 24 months.
In other words, today's calculation may be significantly lower than the reality of 2020.
Microsoft has at times resorted to some of the same name calling it used in 2012 for Windows XP when it has talked about the venerable Windows 7, which remains the stock enterprise OS. A year ago, for example, the head of Microsoft Germany said Windows 7 was "long outdated" and argued that the operating system did not meet "the high security requirements of IT departments."
Expect Microsoft to ramp up that line of attack as Jan. 14 [2020] approaches, when Microsoft is almost certain to remind customers that the Windows 7 drop-dead date is two years away and closing fast.Worse yet, comparisons with Windows XP seem to be ignoring another important trend in personal computing: the end of Moore's Law as personal computing's driving principle. When Windows 7 was released in 2009, Moore's Law was still driving the tech industry, with shrinking dies resulting in the shrinking size and increasing power of, e.g., smartphones, even as the PC power growth curve was already levelling off. Now, though, even smartphones' computing power has plateaued, and PC and laptop sales have been decreasing year-over-year for six years and counting.
All of which means that new PC sales will not drive Windows 10 adoption with individual consumers, in the way that it did for Windows 7. Even if large corporations and institutions adopt Windows 10 in a yooge way this year (something which isn't at all certain, IMHO), Windows 7 is clearly set up to hold its user base much, much longer than Windows XP did, with a dug-in user base that distrusts Microsoft's every utterance just on principle. Trash talk from Redmond is unlikely to yield any more positive results in two years' time than it's yielding now.
It's unclear what, if anything, Microsoft can do to earn back the trust and goodwill of those Windows 7 die-hards. GWX damaged that relationship pretty thoroughly, and their ongoing efforts to push Bing, Cortana, Edge, and other Microsoft products on consumers that simply aren't interested are probably not helping. Two years is a long time, but the clock is ticking; if Microsoft really want to win over Win7 users, then they need to start work now on some positive messaging that will appeal to these consumers, rather than continuing to rely on the same tired negative messaging which has clearly not been working, up to now.
Given Microsoft's track record (going all the way back to 2012, remember), I'd say that it's unlikely, but the Redmond team have managed to surprise me once or twice over the last couple of years, so I guess we'll see. Either way, though, I think that Microsoft's master plan to take over the computing world with Windows 10 is in something of a shambles, and people are clearly starting to notice.