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?
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| 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.
