We look at market share data between July 29 and September 7

Sep 17, 2015 04:30 GMT  ·  By

Windows 10 was officially released on July 29, and Microsoft has been pushing it to users running Windows 7 and 8.1 ever since, so it’s no surprise that this OS version has one of the biggest growth rates experienced in the last decade (some say that it’s even performing better than Windows 7 in the first 30 days of the market).

Microsoft claims that more than 75 million PCs are already running Windows 10 right now, and that figure is expected to reach 100 million by the end of the month, so market share data provided by analysts should show a continuous growth trend of the new OS.

Well, it depends, because as you can see in the data offered to us by StatCounter for Windows 10’s first 40 days of availability, meaning between July 29 and September 7, the performance of the new OS is full of ups and downs and looks very similar to the one of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

How many users actually downgraded?

In other words, some users moved from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10 (either because they wanted to or just because Microsoft pushed the upgrade to them) and then decided to go back. How many of them did that is too early to tell, but for the moment, the new OS is growing at a rather slow pace.

Windows 10’s peak point was on September 6, when it reached a share of 8.09 percent, before eventually dropping the next day to 7.42 percent. On the same day, Windows 7 also reached the most significant drop in the last few years, to 49.93 percent, but jumped to 51.33 percent on September 7.

Windows XP was the only Windows OS version with a steady performance, although the graph also shows some ups and downs for it too, but in its case, it still has a market share that’s above 9 percent.

Right now, Windows 10 is very close to surpassing Windows XP, and if the same growth rate is maintained, expect that to happen sometime in the next few weeks. After that, only the sky’s the limit.