Windows 10 finally overtakes Windows 7 as the most popular desktop OS

By Abdul Wahab ⏐ 7 years ago ⏐

3 min read

Three years after its official release, Windows 10 has finally overtaken Windows 7 in the desktop market share. According to Net Market Share’s latest report, Windows 10 as of December 2018 is the most popular OS in the desktop arena.

Initially, Microsoft had predicted and aimed for Windows 10 to reach 1 billion devices after the first two-three years of its release. However, this did not happen and Microsoft had to revise their initial goal. It should be noted that Windows 10 has been much more successful than its predecessors Windows 8 (8.0 and 8.1).

Ever since its official release, Windows 10 was lagging behind Windows 7 in the desktop market share but this has finally changed. According to Net Market share, Windows 10 now has a market share of 39.22% compared to 36.90% of Windows 7.

The now most popular operating system, Windows 10 at its official release was installed over 75 million PCs within the first four weeks of its official release, it later reached the 110 million mark in the next ten weeks. The operating system further enjoyed more success as it reached 200 million devices in the next six months, 270 million devices after the first eight months, 300 million after the first nine months, 350 million after the first 11 months, 400 million after the first 14 months and eventually going past 700 million devices as of September 2018. A major factor for Window’s success can be explained by Stream’s statistics which highlights that 63.79% user use Windows 10 (64 bit) on the gaming platform compared to 26.08% usage of Windows 7 (64 bit).

As per the stats released by Net Market share, the world of the desktop is still massively covered by the Windows OS, with Mac OS standing at 10.65% followed by Linux which currently has a total of 2.78% market share.

A further breakdown of the Windows market share suggests that Windows 10 is covering the major chunk of the share at 39.22% followed by Windows 7 at 36.9%. An interesting to note here was that the archaic Windows XP is still in the run and has an impressive market share of 4.54% which is more than the market share of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. One possible reason for this can be attributed to lack of upgrade by some corporate sectors or even some schools which do not have enough funding to upgrade the OS to Windows 10 since it requires better hardware. While there was no sign of Windows Vista, one of Microsoft’s biggest failure in the software arena.

However, Windows faced a dip in its market share overall as it slipped 0.83% to 86.20% as of December 2018, whereas MacOS increased to 10.65% from 9.02% while Linux’s share increased to 2.78% from 2.12%.