The end of April statistics for desktop operating system market share from Net Applications show that uptake of Windows 10 is continuing, but at a slower rate.

The free upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and later versions is still free. With the July deadline, i.e 12 months from the launch of Windows 10, for this offer fast approaching you might expect to see an increase in the rate of adoption of Windows 10.

This just doesn't seem to be happening.

The main message from this month's pie chart is that for the first time Windows 7 is no longer on the majority of desktops. Whereas three months ago, when we last reported on the global desktop OS scene Windows 7 had 52.47%, its share has now dropped to 47.82%, a difference of 4.65%. Windows XP also continues to decline - and has dropped a further 0.79% since January. 

You might expect that this would be reflected in an increase for Windows 10 - but in fact since the end of January Windows 10 has only increased its share by 3.49%. One anomaly is that Windows 8.0 has in fact gained 0.51% over this period!

More worrying for Microsoft is that Windows share of the desktop market has fallen below 90% for the first time since Net Applications started collecting these statistics in 2007.

There is a lot of speculation that Microsoft will extend the free upgrade to Windows 10 beyond the July deadline. But until such an announcement is made we had better continue believing that the deadline is real. Once this is certain users of Windows 7 who don't want to upgrade will be feeling increasingly annoyed at the amount of nagging they are subject to. Is this enough to make them desert Windows in droves, I rather doubt it.

At the beginning of the year we reported Windows 10 At 200 Million Devices but since then, it seems, Microsoft isn't making significant headway towards being on 1 Billion. 

More Information

NetMarketShare

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