Windows 7 gained market share last month, while everybody else lost ground.Seriously, WTAF?

OK, I'll admit it... I have no idea what's going on with OS market share trends this year.

Last year seemed to have a clear pattern. With few exceptions, Windows consistently lost share each month to MacOS and Linux, with Chrome staying steady. This year, though, Windows is growing while everyone else has started to slip. That would seem to be the perfect story for Microsoft, who have been waiting for Windows 10 to finally start taking over the desktop/laptop OS market for years, and for tech punditry, who have mostly been expecting business and government deployments to finally make that happen as Windows 7 winds down to end-of-service in January of 2020.

But that's not what we see happening. Instead, Windows 10 is slowly sliding along with all over OS versions, while Windows 7 and 8.1 together posted gains that are strong enough to raise Windows' overall user market share of the desktop/laptop space. It's demented... and yet, it's also happening.

So, what the actual fuck is actually happening?

Comparing last month's numbers with this month's, by same OS version.

I could understand if some Windows 10 users were rolling back to Windows 7, or if some newly-minted Linux users had switched back to Windows 7 - after all, I've done that before, my own self.

But it's not just Windows 10 and/or Linux that are being cannibalized by Windows 7; according to NetMarketShare's numbers, MacOS users are also switching to Windows 7, apparently having already spent the Apple Tax to buy their (expensive) new Macs.

Only one possible explanation occurs to me, and I have no idea whether it's reasonable or not. I'm starting to wonder whether NetMarketShare's are being skewed by something which they themselves claimed to have dealt with before: botnets.

Here's the graph that goes with those numbers.

NMS have struggle with botnets before, of course. It was in December of 2017 that NMS completely revamped their entire methodology and their data sets, in order to remove data which they said came from Linux botnet traffic:

As bot traffic across the web has risen dramatically, it has been a challenge to detect and remove it from our dataset. This is a critical issue since bots can cause significant skewing of data. In particular, we have seen situations where traffic from certain large countries is almost completely bot traffic. In other countries, ad fraudsters generate traffic that spoofs certain technologies in order to generate high-value clicks. Or, they heavily favor a particular browser or platform.

The primary focus of this release was to build detection methods to eliminate this traffic. We rewrote the entire collection and aggregation infrastucture to address this issue.

Please note: This dataset is separate from and replaces the legacy data. Subscribers that need legacy data please contact us for access.

I was rather skeptical of NNM's botnet claims back in 2017. After all, the reason NMS were working overtime to "address" their botnet "issue" was that Linux was skyrocketing in popularity in their data. But Linux is famously either more secure than Windows 7, or less heavily targeted than Windows 7, with the added advantage of being disproportionately favoured by network administrators and other IT professionals. Linux botnet aren't impossible, of course, but rampant Linux botnets of the sort that would double Linux's presence in NMS's data seem... unlikely, shall we say.

Windows 7, though, was the most popular desktop OS on Earth for a very long time, and was heavily targeted by malware. The idea of a Linux botnet seemed farfetched, but Windows 7 botnets happen all the time. Is it possible that a new Windows 7 botnet is generating a buttload of false Windows 7 detections for NMS? Or, rather, is it plausible?

Whatever the cause, at least a couple of other sites have noticed these nonsensical numbers.

• Netmarketshare: Upside Down world as both Windows 7 and Edge makes a comeback

• Windows 10 loses share as Windows 7 makes significant gains

We'll have to see if anyone else picks up on this. For what it's worth, though, NMS's major rival StatCounter are seeing the OS market very differently.

As reported by Betanews:

Windows 10 fans who want to disagree with NetMarketShare's findings, can take solace from StatCounter's figures, as that firm shows Windows 10 growing by 1.6 percentage points in February, to give it 54.78 percent, and Windows 7 declining by 1.16 percentage points to give it 33.89 percent. That's a difference of 20.89 points in the new OS's favor.

As the saying goes... once is an incident, and twice is a coincidence. We'll have to see if next month brings us evidence of enemy action. One thing's for sure, though: 2019 is shaping up to me a much more interesting year for OS user market share watchers than most would have predicted just a few months ago.