Windows 7 passes 60% market share ahead of Windows 10’s debut

As Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 continue to struggle with gaining significant adoption, their predecessor continues to capitalize. This past month, Windows 7 passed the 60 percent market share mark, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.

In fact, Windows 7 saw the most growth of any operating system version in June: up 3.22 percentage points to hit 60.98 percent. Windows 8 meanwhile fell 0.67 percentage points to 2.90 percent, while Windows 8.1 gained just 0.24 percentage points to hit 13.12 percent. Together, they owned 16.02 percent of the market at the end of June, down from 16.45 percent at the end of May. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have yet to pass the 20 percent market share mark, and with Windows 10 debuting on July 29, they may never pull it off.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1760674,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,dev,","session":"C"}']

Windows 7 will likely keep its title of the most popular OS for quite some time. It overtook Windows XP in September 2012 and has never looked back. Since passing the 50 percent mark in May 2014, Windows 7 has stayed above the halfway point ever since and has increased its share steadily throughout 2015 (it’s up overall from 55.92 percent in January, experiencing only a small drop in May). This is all despite Microsoft’s various attempts at pushing businesses and consumers to upgrade.

See also: IE falls below 55% market share as Chrome and Firefox gain

This growth has to come from somewhere. Windows Vista fell 0.39 points to 1.62 percent. Windows XP dropped a solid 2.62 points to 11.98 percent. Once Windows 7’s only real competitor, XP fell below the 20 percent mark in October and should now only need a few more months to see single digits again. Businesses are taking their time, but they’re finally reacting to Microsoft ending support for the operating system in April 2014.

On the whole, Windows lost a bit of share in June, down 0.22 points to 90.85 percent. Mac OS X and Linux capitalized on the losses, gaining 0.19 points to 7.54 percent and 0.04 points to 1.61 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.

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