Windows 10 Sales Up but Windows 7 Still Dominates

Windows 10 adoption by the global public took a bit of a hit earlier this year when the ability to download and use the OS for free came to an end and new users found themselves having to buy the Microsoft OS or have it come bundled with a new computer.

But the latest figures for Windows 10 adoption however show that maybe, just maybe, Windows 10 adoption could be picking up again and could hit a sizeable 24% of the world’s PC market share by the end of 2016.

That’s the news most industry commentators are making of the latest Netmarketshare recently released stats anyway.

Netmarketshare’s figures for November, show that Windows 10 has so far captured 23.72% of the desktop PC market, compared to 22.59% in October, a small but significant rise of 1.13%.

Of course, the majority of that growth for Microsoft’s newest flagship operating system took place mainly during the first six months of the year when the free upgrades were available.

Consequently, when the offer ended in July, the number of downloads of the new OS took an obvious hit in both September and October, but now, probably thanks to Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are up.

That said, Windows 10 still has a long way to go. Despite being the main Microsoft OS, and having aggressively pushed users on older OSs to upgrade, in the overall scheme of things, Netmarketshare still has Windows 7 well ahead with 47.17% of the market share.

Microsoft has come in for some serious criticism in the last year and a half for the method and manner in which it was seen to try and trick people into starting the upgrade to Windows 10.

Windows 8 was found to have just under 10% of overall OS share, while the long discontinued, and no longer supported Windows XP still accounts for 8.63% of all OS software. That’s not a bad figure for an OS that is almost 20 years old.

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