Windows 10 passes 10% market share, overtakes Windows 8.1 and Windows XP

Six months after its release, Windows 10 has finally passed 10 percent market share. Not only that, but the latest and greatest version from Microsoft has also overtaken Windows 8.1 and Windows XP, 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. Last month, Windows 10 passed 200 million active devices — Microsoft is aiming for 1 billion devices running Windows 10 “in two to three years.”

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Windows 10 had 9.96 percent market share in December and gained 1.89 percentage points in January to hit 11.85 percent. Aside from its first month, Windows 10 has gained about 1 percentage point each month, though December was particularly strong, likely due to holiday sales. Later this year, Microsoft plans to make Windows 10 a “recommended update” so that Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users are even more likely to install it.

Windows 8 dipped 0.08 percentage points to 2.68 percent, while Windows 8.1 regained 0.10 points to 10.40 percent. Together, they owned 13.08 percent of the market at the end of January. The duo will fall below the 10 percent mark this year, despite having never even passed the 20 percent market-share mark (the peak was 16.45 percent in May 2015).

Before Windows 10’s debut, Windows 7 passed the 60 percent market-share mark in June. It started 2016 at 52.47 percent, down a whopping 3.21 points.

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. It will likely fall under the 50 percent mark this year, but is unlikely to fall much more than that.

Windows Vista managed to gain 0.07 points to 1.69 percent, and Windows XP also somehow rebounded 0.49 points to 11.42 percent. The free upgrade to Windows 10 doesn’t apply to Vista or XP, but this is still an unfortunate start to the year. Microsoft was likely hoping XP would see single market-share digits by now, given that the company ended support for the ancient operating system in April 2014.

On the whole, Windows slipped 0.71 points to 90.61 percent in December. Those losses were, of course, direct gains for Mac OS X and Linux, which were up 0.66 points and 0.05 points to 7.68 percent and 1.71 percent, respectively.

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 December are available here.