Windows 10 Finally Cracks 50 Percent Market Share As Windows 7 Decline Accelerates

Windows 10 has been on the market for four years, and it has taken longer to reach some of the important milestones that Microsoft has initially set. Four years post-launch Windows 10 is just now reaching 50% market share for operating systems. Windows 7 is on the decline, and Windows 10 passed it in market share for the first time back in January.

Windows 10 adoption started strongly but slowed as the months progressed. The slowing forced Microsoft to back off its early predictions for Windows 10. The software giant had predicted 1 billion devices running Windows 10 in two to three years. In its first month of availability, Windows 10 was on 75 million PCs, and by ten weeks it was on 110 million devices. By June 2018, that number had swelled to 700 million.

As of July 2019, Windows 10 was standing at 48.86% market share and grew 2.13% to reach 50.99% in August. Metrics show that Windows 10 growth has slowed significantly since Microsoft stopped offering free upgrades in July 2016. Windows 7 is currently sitting at a still significant 30.34% share of currently installed Windows operating systems. Windows 10 may get a boost in the coming months with support for Windows 7 set to end on January 14, 2020. 

The data for these numbers comes from Net Applications, and while Windows 10 has just now grabbed 50% of the Windows market share, Windows overall is vastly ahead of other operating systems on the market. Windows holds 87.50% of the market with Mac OS at a distant 9.74%, Linux at 2.14%, and Chrome OS at 0.36%.

With that being said, Microsoft has encountered some difficulty with Windows 10 updates with a recent issue being update 1903 causing high CPU usage for some users.