Windows 10 gains 25pc market share, still way behind Windows 7

Nearly 47 percent of computers across the world still work on Microsoft’s old operating system Windows 7 despite the fact that the latest and greatest operating system Windows 10 released nearly 18 months back and was available as free upgrade for more than a year, according to the latest NetMarketShare data.

Windows 10’s January market share stands at 25.3 percent, up from 24.6 percent in December 2017. That represents more than double the market share Windows 10 enjoyed a year ago when it held 11.85 percent of the market.

Though Windows 10 was off to a flying start with over 75 million PCs in its first four weeks but very soon Microsoft had to admit that its aim for 1 billion devices running Windows 10 “in two to three years,” wasn’t easy to achieve in the face of ever declining Windows phones sales.

Also, post the expiry of the free upgrade offer the company witnessed a further decline in the growth rate.

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. As for the other versions of Windows, Windows 8 recorded a slip of 0.04 percentage points to 1.62 percent, while Windows 8.1 stayed flat at 6.90 percent. According to the report, their combined ownership of the market was 8.52 percent at the end of January.

Windows 7 though still rules the roost but its share too is slowly depleting. Marking over 60 percent share in June 2015, Windows 7 has fallen to 47.20 percent as of January’17.

Coming to Mac; Mac OS X 10.12 accounts for 2.75 percent of market share while Mac OS X 10.11 and Mac OS X 10.10 have 1.73 percent and 1.07 percent share respectively. Overall Mac OS X gained 0.25 points in January to stand at 6.32 percent.

Also, Windows slipped 0.31 percentage points to 91.41 percent and Linux gained 0.06 points to 2.27 percent.