StatCounter’s trend lines for Windows version market share. Click here to embiggen
Posted on 02/05/2018 7:36:21 PM PST by dayglored
OS-detection services disagree on which Windows reigns
Web analytics outfit StatCounter last week trumpeted news that Windows 10’s market share overtook Windows 7’s for the first time in January 2018. But other ratings services didn’t find the same result.
StatCounter’s assessment of Windows version market share for January 2018 suggested that Windows 10 scored 42.78 per cent of Windows’ market share, as measured by worldwide internet. That compared to 41.86 per cent for Windows 7.
Here’s a pretty graph showing the trend.
StatCounter’s trend lines for Windows version market share. Click here to embiggen
Before you figure out how to start selling champagne to Microsoft offices, consider that StatCounter has a rival named Netmarketshare and that its January 2018 data has Windows 10 on 34.29 per cent market share, well behind Windows 7’s 42.39 per cent.
Both sites compile their data by watching traffic to real live websites. Netmarketshare says that it considers “100 million valid sessions per month, widely distributed over thousands of websites.” StatCounter says its methodology sees it work “on the basis of more than 10 billion page views per month, by people from all over the world onto our 2 million+ member sites.”
Which is more accurate? That’s hard to say as both are ultimately black boxes.
What we can say with some certainty is that if StatCounter is right, Microsoft has taken two-and-a-half years since Windows 10’s July 2015 launch to beat a product launched in July 2009.
Perhaps that champagne business wasn’t such a good idea after all. ®
It certainly does appear that Win10 is catching up to Win7, albeit a long time after it was originally predicted to.
And NetMarketShare has their own pretty graph which is not nearly so close. But then, NetMarketShare is comparing only the number of desktop and laptop installations, which is a much more "oranges to oranges" comparison, since Win7 was never marketed as a mobile/device OS (as Windows 10 was/is). If the question is "Has Windows 10 caught up to Windows 7?", it doesn't make a lot of sense to include numbers from segments that Win7 was never sold to. Unless, of course, you want to make Windows 10 look like it's beating Win7...
But regardless of presumed agendas, Win10 does keep gaining users, and Win7 does keep shedding users, at least on average.
Two years from now, Jan 2020 will be the cutoff for Win7 extended support. No more security updates. That will be a big deal for a lot of users, especially businesses.
As Jim Morrison used to say, "The future's uncertain but the end is always near."
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I want to try Linux especially some of the privacy distros that will keep hackers and the government from spying on you.
10 Best Security-Centric Linux Distributions For Privacy Protection In 2018
https://techlog360.com/secure-linux-distributions-privacy-protection/
Anyone tried any flavor of Linux?
I’ve suffered through both equally
I dunno, I had Linux for about 10 years.
Now I’m on Windows 10. :D
What is Win8 doing?
Can't stand cortana
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit forever person here.
IMHO, MSFT has been amazed that Win 10 has not already overtaken Win 7.
Win 7 is very durable and is still used a bunch in business. I have a good friend who does IT chores for many businesses here in town. Almost all of them are running Win 7 and have no plans to upgrade. A few of his customers tried Win 10 but all have gone back to Win 7.
Some of his customers have business-critical custom code written under Win 7 that will not run under Win 10 without some very expensive rewrites. In some cases the quoted price of the rewrite is more than the original price. And the rewrite must be tested, documentation will need to be changed, etc. Not a cheap investment.
MSFT has put these folks between a rock and a hard place.
Needed a new laptop recently. The choices were Win10 or Chromebook. Chromebook wouldn’t meet the need, so Win10 picked up some market share. I would have been quite happy with a Win7 (or XP, for that matter).
Still real happy with Windows-7.
I dunno, I had Linux for about 10 years.
Now I’m on Windows 10. :D
Ya right , LOL
Dead as a doornail. Last I knew, it was below the WinXP numbers -- Win8 was 1.49%, Win8.1 was 6.4%, but WinXP was 7.3% :-)
Linux Mint Cinnamon. Easier than Windows 10 by a mile.
Me too.
Cold dead hands.
OK don’t believe me.
I had Windows at work, But Linux at home. For 10 years.
Believe it, don’t believe it. Up to you.
I like Windows 10. Much better security than before.
Windows 10 users , is your hard drive running 100% almost all the time ?
I personally prefer the RedHat family (CentOS, Fedora), although I am also comfortable with the Ubuntu family, but I generally recommend (for folks new to Linux), "Linux Mint", a flavor of Ubuntu which is very friendly to non-geeks.
“Windows 10 users , is your hard drive running 100% almost all the time ?”
No, it isn’t
Windows 10 did kill an older laptop I had but it probably needed replacing anyway.
Ummm, no.
You might be in the midst of a Windows 10 upgrade without realizing it, and/or you might be infected with malware.
(Some folks say there's not much difference, but I won't say that... :-) )
Or your hard drive might be dying and it's having to retry over and over due to disk errors.
nope, it just runs 100% most of the time does not matter how old the computer is
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