Windows 10 gains market share, while Windows 7's share continues to remain the same.
There's both good news and bad news for Microsoft in NetMarketShare's latest market share statistics. On the up side, Windows 10 has gained nearly a full percentage point, moving from 31.95% to 32.93%. On the down side, those gains seem to be coming almost entirely at the expense of Windows 8.1, which dropped 5.97% to 5.71%; and Windows XP, which dropped from 5.73% to 5.18%. And Windows 7 stayed pretty much stable, dipping from 43.12% to 43.08%, a change which drops below my ±0.5% "noise threshold."
So, Windows 10 is still growing slowly, mostly at the expense of the and the least-popular Windows versions, while the most-popular Windows version, 7, continues its run as the new XP. With the new numbers being such an arguably mixed bag, it was really anyone's guess whether tech media sites would continue trumpeting Windows 10's modest gains as if they were some sort of triumph, or recognize that Windows 10 has failed to close the gap for yet another year, in spite of being freely available for the entirety of that year.
You can colour me slightly surprised, then, that MS Power User are taking the latter route, first out of the gate:
Around the middle of last year, we predicted, based on the then trend, that Windows 10 will overtake Windows 7 worldwide by the end of 2017.
Now the latest Netmarketshare numbers are in, and at least by their numbers, it appears that date may be pretty far off still.
It appears in the last quarter of 2017 the decline in Windows 7 numbers stabilized, while Windows 10 lost some momentum.
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Last month Microsoft revealed there were 600 million active Windows 10 users, and we expect it would take around 800 million Windows 10 users to overtake Windows 7, something which may be achievable by the end of next year as enterprise users switch over in increasing numbers to Windows 10.The change in tone, here, from confidently predicting that Windows 10 would overtake Windows 7 in 2017, to describing that same feat as something that "may be achievable," but isn't certain, in 2018, speaks rather eloquently to how much momentum Windows 10 lost as the year went along. Again, it's good news/bad news: Microsoft (mostly) stopped stepping on the self-laid rakes in their own yard as the year went along, but with no bad news to report, people also (mostly) stopped talking about Windows 10 entirely.
Windows 10 isn't new anymore. It isn't interesting, or exciting; consumers (and tech writers) seem to have tired of the relentless updating cycle, and now greed new feature announcements with a collective shrug, and the resigned knowledge that it means another round of problems while Microsoft tries to manage yet another updating cycle, even before the last one is complete. At least this time they'll at least be half-way there, which beats the Spring Creators Update's 33.7%, but still.
I've still got two more months to go before I can call it, but I'm still feeling pretty good about my Windows 10 prognostication.
UPDATE:
It looks like StatCounter's numbers show basically the same trend, according to Betanews:While NetMarketShare’s monthly usage share figures show there to still be a fairly significant gap between Windows 7 and Windows 10 (in the older OS’s favor), rival analyst firm StatCounter has long reported the battle for the top spot to be much, much tighter.
So close is the race in fact, that in October it looked as if Windows 10 would easily pass Windows 7 at some point in the following month. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen, although the gap did narrow. It seemed all but guaranteed that Windows 10 would claim pole position in December, but incredibly it didn’t.Unlike NMS, StatCounter show Windows 8.1 gaining market share over the past month, to 9.16%, which is exactly the opposite of NMS's result, leading me to suspect that something is up with StatCounter's methodology. Considering that NMS recently revamped their entire product offering to filter out bots and botnets, which were skewing their results, one has to wonder if StatCounter has done the same, or if there's some other reason for Windows 8.1's popularity in their data sets.