Windows 10 Moves Ahead of Windows XP

Rumored to be installed and running on almost 148 million PCs now, Windows 10 is moving steadily up the market share ladder for OS’s.

StatCounter today shows that after almost 4 months of availability, Windows 10 has surpassed Windows XP by a small margin.

The majority of the recorded installs are from consumers, considering Windows 10 was released to consumers first when it publicly launched in July 2015. Enterprise and business customers got a feature treatment in November when Microsoft released its biggest update yet (Build 1511 – called November Update) with special attention to business options. Microsoft has touted that businesses are already on board. The last report showed

Analyst firm Gartner is suggesting that in 2016 Windows 10 is poised to become the most widely installed version of Windows ever and that 50% of businesses will deploy Windows 10 by 2017. But the new OS has quite a way to go to catch up to the current leader, Windows 7. Christmas sales of new PCs will help, but business adoption will be the long-term key to meeting Microsoft’s goal of 1 billion installations.

Microsoft’s reported numbers don’t come without scrutiny. Some are proposing that there’s Microsoft’s own number reporting is misleading and is only capturing installed numbers. Conspiracy pundits theorize that Microsoft is only counting installations, not actual usage – meaning that there are a number of Windows 10 installer that are rolling back to their previous Windows version due to problems, and these are not being subtracted from the total number. Windows 10 is not a perfect OS, by any means. Windows 10 can work beautifully on one PC, but be a total failure on another outfitted with the very same hardware, drivers, and software.