14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 10 is definitely the hottest product currently being developed by Microsoft, but despite all the exciting news the company itself shared at BUILD 2015 this week, there’s still growing interest in an older version of Windows.
Statistics provided by market researcher Net Applications show that Windows 7 continues to be the world’s number one desktop operating system, and despite the approaching launch of Windows 10, it continues to increase its share regularly.
Right now, 58.39 percent of the computers in the world are running Windows 7, while Windows XP is the runner-up with 15.93 percent. While XP lost approximately 1 percent of its market share, Windows 7 keeps growing and growing, posting an increase of 0.35 percent last month.
Although this might not seem much, the growth is really important for Microsoft itself because Windows 7 could become a reason for users not to upgrade to Windows 10. Microsoft says it wants 1 billion devices running Windows 10 out there in the next 2 to 3 years, and there’s no doubt that PCs represent a significant part of this plan.
Where’s Windows 8?
While Windows 7 keeps growing, Windows 8 is continuously going down, not only because users go back to 7, but also because they update to 8.1.
Stats show that Windows 8.1 is the third desktop OS in the world with a share of 11.16 percent, obviously, still behind Windows XP, while Windows 8 is far behind with just 3.50 percent.
Windows 8 is slowly going dark in market share stats as the majority of users moved to 8.1 already, so it’ll soon drop to Vista levels, which is currently at 1.95 percent.
But in case you’re wondering, there’s no real threat for Windows right now, as the only non-Windows platform currently present in the top is Mac OS X 10.10 with 4.23 percent. Linux is far behind in these charts with only 1.52 percent.