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Windows 10 surpasses Windows Vista and Windows 8 desktop usage
The beginning of a new month means new market share stats for desktop operating systems and Windows 10 is already moving up the ladder.
3 Min Read
We have already heard from Microsoft that Windows 10 has been upgraded and installed on over 75 million devices in less than a month after the new operating systems release.
That momentum puts it well ahead of any previous release of Windows in Microsoft's history but how are those numbers translating to overall usage of Windows on desktops worldwide?
Since it is the beginning of a new month Net Market Share, a company that tracks statistics for Internet connected devices, now has updated information on overall desktop operating system market share.
I want to take a look at the last three months worth of data for the various versions of Windows and see what the trends look like leading up to the entry of Windows 10 into the marketplace.
Version |
|---|
Windows OS Market Share (Jun - Aug 2015) |
Windows XP |
Windows Vista |
Windows 7 |
Windows 8 |
Windows 8.1 |
Windows 10 |
Data provided by > Net Market Share
So a few observations with these numbers:
Interesting to see Windows XP jump nearly half a percentage point in August. A much smaller gain was seen in July for Windows Vista but the downward trend returning the following month. Could this have been users powering up some old machines to see if they could get their systems to install/upgrade to Windows 10 despite their lack of eligibility?
Windows 7 was trending downwards from June to July but took a big hit in August of almost 3%. I suspect that drop is directly related to Windows 10 upgrades from Windows 7 devices.
The decline of Windows 8 remained steady over this three month period.
Windows 8.1, the free upgrade to Windows 8, only experienced a minute drop between June and July however, it dropped nearly 2% in August. Just like Windows 7, this drop was likely due to upgrades to Windows 10.
The first appearance of Windows 10 in Net Market Share's numbers was in August, the first month of the operating systems global availability, and it grabbed 5.21% of the desktop quickly surpassing its predecessors Windows Vista and Windows 8.
I expect it will overtake Windows 8.1 and Windows XP within the next two months, if not sooner, and jump into second behind Windows 7.
Net Market Share also tracks the desktop share of MAC OS X and so I added together all of the reported versions of that OS for August 2015 and it totals 6.52% of the total share.
That means Windows 10 is just 1.31% away from overtaking the overall MAC OS X market share and that should occur sometime in the next couple of weeks based on the average upgrades to Windows 10 each day (2.5 million daily based on the 75 million installs in the first month). Even if that drops off, Windows 10 will pass OS X sooner rather than later.
Pretty impressive start overall for what has been labeled the last major release of Windows for Microsoft.
But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.
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