Both the big desktop OS market share monitoring firms, StatCounter and Netmarketshare, have revealed their figures for October. Let’s look at StatCounter first.
StatCounter has Windows 10 pegged at a market share of exactly 9% – meaning that it’s now practically level with all the diehards still taking risks on the unsupported Windows XP.
That’s a 1.36% increase on September, which is considerably less than the 2.26% jump seen back in August.
Windows 8 and 8.1 users, by the way, was used by 13.09% of people – down just 0.10% on September . Windows 7, which runs on more than half of all computers, dropped a similarly fractional 0.82 percentage points over October.
As for the figures from Netmarketshare, they don’t indicate such a drop in momentum, with the company having Windows 10 on a market share of 7.94%, up from 6.63% in September – an increase of 1.31%.
In this case, that’s not much of a slowdown compared to the previous month which witnessed a 1.42% increase in share for Windows 10.
So perhaps Microsoft doesn’t have too much to worry about after all, and indeed there’s bound to be a little slowdown expected as time passes.
Netmarketshare has Windows 8.1 on 10.68%, so Windows 10 is closing even faster on its predecessor according to them.
Certainly no one would argue that Windows 10 hasn’t been a big success so far, particularly compared to Microsoft’s previous desktop operating system, which was about as well received as a data breach at a large financial services firm.