Windows 10 Market Share Reaches 19 Percent As Microsoft Races To Migrate From Venerable Windows 7
Windows 10 continues to gain ground on Windows 7 in the race for market share dominance. Though the gap between the two is still rather large, Windows 10 has managed to find its way onto more than 19 percent of the world's PCs, according to the latest data from Net Market Share. That's up from 11.85 percent at the beginning of the year.
It's been a steady climb for Windows 10, which released to the public a year ago this month. The OS got off to a fast start, hitching a ride on 5.21 percent of PCs in its first month of availability and nearly doubling its position by the end of the year with a 9.96 percent share of the desktop market. That momentum continued into 2016 with Windows 10 gaining around 1.5 to 2 percentage points each month.
Net Market Share's figures reflect the desktop OS breakdown through the end of June. As you might be aware, July 29th is the fast approaching deadline to take advantage of Microsoft's free upgrade offer, which allows Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 users to bump up to Windows 10 at no cost. It will be interesting to see how that affects Windows 10's market share as last minute stragglers rush to beat the buzzer.
In the meantime, we can look at the ground that Windows 10 has made up on Windows 7. At the end of July last year, Windows 7 was sitting pretty with a 60.73 percent share of the desktop OS market. As of the end of last month, that's dropped to 49.05 percent. That's a difference of 29.95 percent, whereas the gap between Windows 7 and Windows 10 was 45.72 percent at the beginning of the year.
As for Windows XP, its share of the market finally fell to single-digit territory—at the of June, Windows XP's market share had fallen to 9.78 percent, down from 10.09 percent the month prior and 11.98 percent in the same month a year ago. Around this time two years ago, Windows XP was installed on a quarter of the world's PCs.
