Microsoft witnessed what happens when on-paper predictions take real form. Three months after launch, Windows 10 reaches nearly 8 percent market share.
The initial popularity of Windows 10 was very promising, with more than 75 million PC users installing the OS in the first month. Ten weeks after the release, Windows 10 is now powering 110 million computers.
However, Windows 10's growth decelerated at a visible pace: while in its first month, the OS gained 5 percentage points market share, the next two months saw a rise of only 1 percentage point each. The software company aims to compensate the dragging increase with two actions. One is the deal with Baidu, which should help with the spread of Windows 10 in China, and another is changing Windows 10's status from "optional" to "recommended" in the update section.
The latter, the Redmond-based company hopes, will convince Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 owners to upgrade to the latest Microsoft OS.
Microsoft's vice president of operating systems, Terry Myerson, declared that Microsoft has one ambitious goal: to see Windows 10 booting 1 billion devices, including smartphones, consoles, tablets and regular PCs, by 2018.
Prior to Windows 10 entering the OS arena, Windows 7 led the charts with a confident market share of 60 percent. After the release of the recent Microsoft OS, Windows 7 fell to 55.71 percent market share.
Even if Windows 10 continues to rise in appeal, the popularity of Windows 7 is a reference point for Microsoft. The operating system surpassed the popularity of Windows XP in September 2012 and kept gaining momentum. October 2015 was the first month when Windows 7 showed signs of slowing down. Then, the Windows 7's market share was equal to the one it registered in January 2015, i.e. 55.92 percent.
Microsoft looks forward and hopes to see Windows Vista and XP leaving users' desktops or notebooks as soon as possible. Neither Windows XP, nor Vista allow their owners to freely upgrade to Windows 10. To whom it may concern, Microsoft ceased support for Windows XP in April 2014.
A global overview shows that when compared with rival operating systems, Windows is still taking the lead. In August, Microsoft's popular OS ranked first with a 90.85 percent market share, while Mac OS X came second with 7.52 percent and Linux followed with 1.63 percent.
Net Applications computes data gathered from the 40,000 websites that it monitors, and the average number of unique monthly visitors that are behind the data is about 160 million. This allows Net Applications to have a good grasp on user market share.
