Friday, 1 April 2016

Windows 10 adoption picking up speed, not troubling Windows 7 yet

Windows 10 is making pretty steady progress, at least according to the latest figures which have just been released by NetMarketShare.

The OS bean counters found that Windows 10 now has a 14.15% share of the desktop market as of the end of March, compared to February's figure of 12.82%.

In January, Windows 10 had a share of 11.85%, so the increase to February was just under 1%. In other words, Microsoft's newest OS has made better progress across March with a 1.33% gain in the last month.

That's good news for Microsoft – any increase is going to be welcome news for Nadella and company, of course. And as the summer rolls on, we're likely to see a fairly sizeable uptick in adoption as those who sat on the fence make the move to upgrade to Windows 10 before the end of July deadline (after which, the upgrade is no longer free for Windows 7/8.1 users).

Windows 7 still way ahead

Naturally Windows 7 is still clearly in the lead with NetMarketShare's new figures, sat at the top on 51.89% – although it did drop nearly half a percentage point. Meanwhile, Windows 8.1 also slid slightly down to 9.56% (and with Windows 8 users added in, the previous version of Microsoft's desktop OS totals a 12.01% market share).

You probably didn't miss the fact that at its Build conference, Microsoft put a firm figure on the number of Windows 10 devices out there, which now totals 270 million.

At Build this week, Microsoft spilled plenty of details on what's coming in the Anniversary Update (previously known as Redstone) due to land this summer. This will include a big boost for stylus users in the form of Windows Ink which is designed to make pen usage far more intuitive (so you can do things like scribble a date and have Windows automatically set up a reminder through Cortana).

Speaking of Cortana, the digital assistant will naturally be bolstered as well, and Microsoft has a serious focus on bots and AI now, with the company hoping to push forward on this front and leave Apple and Google's virtual assistants in its dust.

Via: Betanews