Windows 10 passes 20% market share

One year after its release, Windows 10 has passed 20 percent market share. That means one in five computers are now running the latest and greatest operating system from Microsoft, according to Net Applications.

Windows 10 was installed on over 75 million PCs in its first four weeks. It passed 110 million devices after 10 weeks, 200 million in under six months, 270 million after eight months, 300 million after nine months, and then 350 million after 11 months. Microsoft was aiming for 1 billion devices running Windows 10 “in two to three years,” but recently the company backpedaled on that goal.

Windows 10 had 19.14 percent market share in June and gained 1.99 percentage points in July to hit 21.13 percent. Windows 10 market share growth has slowed over the past few months, but with the free upgrade expiring at the end of July, there was naturally a rush for many to upgrade before the deadline.

Windows 8 fell 0.36 percentage points to 2.09 percent, while Windows 8.1 dipped 0.21 points to 7.80 percent. Together, they owned 9.89 percent of the market at the end of July, falling back below the 10 percent mark. The duo never even passed the 20 percent market-share mark (the peak was 16.45 percent in May 2015).

Windows 7 started 2016 at 52.47 percent, but has fallen to 47.01 percent as of July. And yet, that’s still double Windows 10’s slice of the pie; Windows 7 will likely keep its title of “most popular OS” for a long time. Windows 7 overtook Windows XP way back in September 2012, and passed the 60 percent market-share mark in June 2015.

Windows Vista managed to gain 0.01 points to 1.22 percent, and Windows XP also somehow rebounded 0.56 points to 10.34 percent. The free upgrade to Windows 10 doesn’t apply to Vista or XP, so while they have been losing share overall, their decline isn’t as steady.

On the whole, Windows stayed flat at 89.79 percent in July. Mac OS X slipped 0.32 points to 7.87 percent, and Linux gained 0.31 points to 2.33 percent.

Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month, by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. This means it measures user market share.

If you prefer usage market share, you’ll want to get your data from StatCounter, which looks at 15 billion page views every month. The operating system figures for July are available here.