Windows 10 grabs 7.94% market share, slowly stealing from Windows 7 and XP

Microsoft’s free Windows 10 upgrade isn’t winning over as many users as the company probably had hoped. After three months, Windows 10 has captured almost 8 percent market share, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.

Windows 10 was installed on over 75 million PCs in its first four weeks, and passed 110 million after 10 weeks. While we don’t have a more recent figure yet, Microsoft is aiming to have 1 billion devices running Windows 10 “in two to three years” — though that includes not just PCs, but smartphones, consoles, and other devices, as well.

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Windows 10 had 6.63 percent market share in September, and gained 1.31 percentage points to hit 7.94 percent in October. Growth has dramatically slowed already: Windows 10 jumped almost 5 percentage points in its first month, while it only gained a little over 1 point in its second and its third months (each). To counter this slowdown, Microsoft has announced a Baidu partnership to push Windows 10 in China, as well as a plan to make Windows 10 a “recommended update,” which would make Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users more likely to install it.

Where Windows 10 gained, its predecessors naturally slipped. Windows 8 dipped 0.06 percentage points to 2.54 percent, while Windows 8.1 fell 0.04 points to 10.68 percent. Together, they owned 13.22 percent of the market at the end of October. Next year, the duo will fall below the 10 percent mark, which is a little crazy, given they never even passed the 20 percent market share mark (the peak was 16.45 percent in May).

Before Windows 10’s debut, Windows 7 passed the 60 percent market share mark in June. It’s also unlikely to ever to see that figure again: Windows 7 saw the biggest drop of any operating system version in October, down 0.82 points to 55.71 percent.

Despite Windows 10’s inevitable rise, 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 has never looked back, steadily increasing its share. In October, Windows 7 finally fell below where it was at the beginning of 2015 (55.92 percent in January).

Windows Vista gained 0.01 points to 1.74 percent, while Windows XP fell 0.53 points to 11.68 percent. The free upgrade to Windows 10 doesn’t apply to Vista or XP, but Microsoft is likely still hoping XP sees single market share digits this year, as businesses are still reacting to the operating system’s end of support in April 2014.

On the whole, Windows lost a bit of share in October, down 0.12 points to 90.42 percent. Mac OS X gained 0.28 points to 8.00 percent, while Linux fell 0.17 points to 1.57 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.

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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 October are available here.