14 DAY TRIAL // A new round of statistics provided by Net Applications for the month of October 2015 shows that Windows 10 keeps growing, but at a slower pace than it did in its very first weeks on the market.
Right now, Windows 10 has a market share of 7.94 percent, which makes it the fourth most-used desktop operating system in the world. Windows 7 continues to be the leader with a share of 55.71 percent, followed by Windows XP with 11.68 percent and Windows 8.1 with 10.68 percent.
In Windows 10’s case, Microsoft’s latest desktop operating system debuted on July 29 with a share of 0.39 percent, but it quickly reached 5.21 percent in August thanks to Microsoft’s free upgrade program. The growth continued in September with a share of 6.63 percent before eventually achieving 7.94 percent the following month.
Windows 7 market share
If the same trend is maintained, Windows 10 could overtake Windows 8.1 by the end of the year, but it will still take many months or even years before it becomes a threat to Windows 7.
And speaking of Windows 7, the operating system introduced in 2009 lost approximately 5 percent since the debut of Windows 10 in July, and the very same descending trend is likely to continue as more people move to the new software to benefit from the free upgrade.
This offer lasts until July 2016, so expect its figures to drop significantly in the next 9 months. Microsoft has a goal of bringing Windows 10 on 1 billion devices across the world by 2017, and upgrading Windows 7 PCs is a priority, so the company is very likely to increase its efforts in the coming months to convince those on previous versions of Windows to install the new release.
Right now, there are more than 110 million users running Windows 10, so Microsoft has approximately 14 more months to achieve its goal.