Windows 10 usage is on the rise, figures indicate

Nov 28, 2015 07:01 GMT  ·  By

Windows 10 was launched with much fanfare in July 2015, and since then, Microsoft has been hard at work to promote the operating system, planning to convince everyone to at least give it a try.

Since July, adoption on Windows 10 has been on the rise, but not at the pace that Microsoft expected to reach. But data provided by the United States government websites shows that Microsoft has no reason to be upset.

Data offered by the Digital Analytics Program, which monitors a total of 3,800 websites owned by the United States government and its agencies, points to rapid growth in Windows 10 adoption, but also to a significant collapse of Windows 7 since the new operating system came out.

Windows 10 growing trend

This table put together by ZDNet and comparing adoption trends since the beginning of the year clearly reveals that Windows 10 is the top performer of 2015, as all the previous Windows versions actually lost users.

Windows 7 declined no less than 7 percent between Q1 2015 and November 2015 while Windows 10, despite the fact that it launched in July, posted a growth of 12.4 percent. Windows 8.1 also lost 1.1 percent of its users, and only 15.7 percent of the desktop computers visiting government websites in November were powered by this OS version.

Despite the decline, Windows 7 remains the top desktop operating system in the country with 64.2 percent market share, which means that more than 1 in 2 PCs are running it at the moment.

A different comparison, though, shows that Windows 7 usage drops during the weekends, with only 48.9 percent of the computers accessing government pages on Saturdays and Sundays running it. Usage grows to 67.5 percent on weekdays.

In Windows 10's case, statistics are exactly the opposite: 18.1 percent of consumers use it on weekends while 10.6 percent of them do the same on weekdays.

Nevertheless, it's worth mentioning that these numbers cannot be entirely accurate for the whole world and the rest of the industry, but they do show the obvious: Windows 10 adoption is one the rise while the previous Windows versions are slowly but surely losing ground.