Windows share on desktops fell below 90 percent

Windows 7 is still in the lead, but not overwhelmingly

Nine months after the release of Windows 10, the share of Windows 7 has finally fallen below 50 percent, and Windows XP has reached the single-digit limit. Although this is good news for Microsoft, however, April was not the best month for Windows, which, according to the latest Net Applications data, occupies less than 90 percent of the market for the first time.

Let us examine these numbers. First, you need to take into account the desire of Microsoft to get 1 billion devices running Windows 10 "within two to three years." Windows 10 was installed on more than 75 million computers in the first four weeks, 110 million devices in 10 weeks, 200 million in six months, and 270 million in eight months, venturebeat.com reports .

This takeover has led to a marked increase for Microsoft, but this growth is slowing. The share of Windows 10 in the market was 14.15 percent in March and added only 0.20 percent in April, reaching a value of 14.35 percent.
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Net Applications Web Analytics

The Windows 8 operating system somehow gained 0.50 percentage points, reaching 2.95 percent, while Windows 8.1 increased by 0.40 points to 9.16 percent. Together, they occupied 12.11 percent of the market at the end of April. It is predicted that the share of this duet will fall below 10 percent by the end of 2016.

Prior to the release of the Windows 10 operating system, Windows 7 OS occupied 60 percent of the market share in June 2015, since the beginning of 2016 the mark fell to 52.47 percent, and at the moment its share is 48.27 percent.

Despite the inevitable growth of upgrades to Windows 10, the Windows 7 operating system is likely to retain the title of “most popular OS” for a long time. According to this indicator, Windows 7 overtook Windows XP back in September 2012.

Windows Vista accounted for 1.34 percent, while Windows XP dropped 1.24 points to 9.66 percent. The decline in the share of XP waited a long time, considering that Microsoft stopped supporting the “ancient” operating system back in April 2014.

Overall, the share of the Windows OS family dropped 1.22 points to 89.23 percent as of April 2016. Mac OS X, meanwhile, increased its share by 1.43 points to 9.20 percent. The share of Linux is 1.56 percent.


World OS market, data for April 2016

Windows never fell below the 90 percent mark, at least according to Net Applications (data for November 2007, when Windows held 95.89 percent of the market). Although Windows is very slowly losing its share over the years, it is worth noting that the point of falling has never exceeded 1 percent. Windows is expected to "return" its 90 percent already this month.

Net Applications uses data of 160 million unique visitors monthly, monitoring covers about 40 thousand websites.