14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft started the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update rollout on October 17, and while everyone expected this new release to boost adoption of the operating system, early figures show little improvement in market share trends worldwide.
Windows 10 has barely improved its share in October 2017, according to NetMarketShare data, remaining the second most-used desktop operating system worldwide after leader Windows 7.
Windows 10 improved from 29.09 percent to 29.26 percent the last month, yet it’s worth noting that the Fall Creators Update not only that has been available for roughly 13 days the last month, but it’s also being rolled out in stages, so not all customers are getting it right away.
The slow growth seems to indicate that the majority of people who manually upgraded to the Fall Creators Update were mostly existing Windows 10 users running an older version of the operating system.
Windows 7 still top desktop OS
Windows 7, on the other hand, is still declining, and this new batch of figures shows that it’s losing share at nearly the same pace as in the previous months. In October 2017, Windows 7 was running on 46.63 percent of desktop computers worldwide, down from 47.21 percent. So while Windows 10 increased 0.17 percent, Windows 7 dropped 0.53 percent, which means the latest version of the OS managed to reduce the gap slightly last month.
Windows 10, however, still needs a faster-growing pace, as Microsoft will pull support for Windows 7 in approximately two years and the company does not afford the operating system launched in 2009 to be running on too many systems when the time comes.
Judging from what happened with Windows XP when end-of-life was reached in April 2014, there’s a good chance this is impossible to avoid, especially because Windows 7 users not only they don’t seem too eager to upgrade to Windows 10, but they also show little concern regarding their security after support is pulled.