Early in the year, Microsoft told users of PCs still running the outdated Windows 7 operating system to do so at their own risk, due to concerns on future hardware and software compatibility and overall security.
At the time, Windows 7 was still the operating system of choice for 55 percent of all computers. A new report states that, while Windows 7 is still the king of operating systems, it no longer powers the majority of computers worldwide.
Nine months since Windows 10 was released, at the end of April, the market share of Windows 7 is now finally below 50 percent, while the market share of Windows XP has fallen into single digits to 9.66 percent. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 combined now hold 12.11 percent of the market, with the figure expected to fall below 10 percent within the year.
Microsoft has previously stated that it is pushing to have 1 billion devices running Windows 10 within two to three years, and within eight months after its release, the operating system has been installed on 270 million devices. This was good for a market share of 14.15 percent in March.
However, the growth of Windows 10 is slowing down, as it only gained a meager 0.20 percentage points in April to rise to 14.35 percent. As it stands, it could take a long time for it to surpass Windows 7 as the world's most popular operating system for computers. Having the operating system on 1 billion devices looks even more difficult to reach with a slowdown in growth, but it could still be within the realm of possibility for Microsoft to pull off the feat.
Windows 7 is not the cause for Windows 10's slowdown though. The operating system held over 60 percent of the market in June 2015, before Windows 10 was launched, but that figure decreased to 52.47 percent at the start of the year and now to 49.79 percent by the end of April.
The reason for the slowdown of Windows 10 adoption could be due to the fact that, for the first time, Windows held less than 90 percent of the market. The figure, however, is largely expected to be back over 90 percent by the end of next month.
