Stats show most Windows 10 adopters come from Windows 7

Dec 28, 2015 10:00 GMT  ·  By

Windows 7 and 8.1 users can install Windows 10 free of charge until July 29, 2016, and Microsoft has made upgrading these computers to the new OS a priority. So it’s no surprise that Windows 10’s new user base is mostly made of people coming from older Windows versions.

This chart provided by StatCounter for the first 26 days of December 2015 shows that Windows 10 managed to increase its share during the declining periods experienced by Windows 7.

There is a clear reason for that: users who previously ran Windows 7 on their PCs upgraded to Windows 10, but the graph also shows a market performance that’s full of ups and downs for the new operating system.

While Windows 10 did manage to increase its share by stealing some users from Windows 7, it also lost some in favor of its predecessor only days after that.

One up, the other one down

For example, Windows 10 reached a market share of 12.84 percent on December 6, while Windows 7 dropped from 46.54 percent on December 5 to 45.18 percent the next day. This means it lost more than 1 percent in just 24 hours, and many of these users actually went to Windows 10.

On December 6, however, Windows 10 again dropped to 10.97 percent, while Windows 7 recovered to no less than 48.59 percent. It’s impossible to tell, however, how many of the users who went back to Windows 7 actually downgraded from Windows 10.

What is very clear, however, is that Windows 10 keeps growing these days. It does it slowly, but the growth is there, and Microsoft expects it to accelerate in early 2016, when more enterprises are scheduled to begin the transition to the new operating system. What’s more, Windows 10 will also become a recommended download in Windows Update, so more Windows 7 and 8.1 users will actually install the new OS.