A year after Microsoft introduced its free upgrade offer to Windows 10 for PCs running Windows 7 or Windows 8, the company finally put an end to this year-long opportunity last Friday. Microsoft’s significant upgrade push didn’t avoid some controversy during the past year, as many users complained that its Windows 10 upgrade prompts have been too aggressive and confusing, but there is no denying that the Windows 10 launch has been an overall success for the company.
On June 29, the Redmond giant announced that Windows 10 was already running on 350 million devices (including PCs, phones, Xbox One gaming consoles and more), which was 50 million more devices than the previous milestone announced by the company on May 5. As we’re now just one day from the release of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we expect the company to release an update on the number of devices running the latest OS pretty soon.
In the meantime, Windows 10 currently enjoys a 21.13% desktop operating system share according to the latest data from NetMarketShare. While Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 now represents less than 10% of the PC market (their respective market share currently clock at 2.09% and 7.8%), Windows XP still closes the podium with a 10.34% market share, far from the seven-years-old Windows 7 which currently leads with 47.01%.
Obviously, Windows 10 has still a long way to go before eventually catching up to Windows 7. Microsoft is well aware of this, as the company recently acknowledged that it won’t met its goal of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 in 2018. However, Windows 7 won’t claim the top step eternally as PC manufacturers have until October 31 to sell off all their stocks of computers running Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1. In other words, all new PCs will come with Windows 10 in just three months.
Now that the free upgrade for past operating systems is over, it will be interesting to see how the Windows 10 market share will evolve over the next few months. Let us know in the comments if you think the new operating system will be able to maintain its steady growth in the future.
