14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 10’s early adoption figures show that Microsoft’s new operating system is gaining ground at a decently fast pace, and although its growth has more or less slowed down in the past month, it’s clearly going in the right direction.
But data provided for the month of September points out that, in China, Windows 10 is very far behind all of its predecessors, and if the same trend is maintained, it is very unlikely to overtake any of them in the next few months.
While in Denmark Windows 10 is very close to reaching a 20 percent market share (and it has already surpassed Windows 8.1 and Windows XP), in China, Windows 10 is only the fourth most-used operating system with a share of just 4.33 percent.
This makes it more popular than OS X (2.13 percent) and Windows 8 (2 percent), but well behind Windows 7, Windows XP, and Windows 8.1, with 53.56%, 29.87%, and 5.3%, respectively.
China’s piracy levels
While it’s hard to determine the reason Windows 10 is yet to skyrocket in China, some claim that the new operating system is not as easy to pirate as its predecessors, despite the fact that cracks and activation software are already available if you know where to look.
It's not a secret that China is a piracy paradise, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself admitted that, for the Redmond-based software giant, that was indeed a huge problem. Nine out of ten Windows copies running on Chinese computers were pirated two years ago, Ballmer claimed, and Microsoft had only a few options at that time.
One of the ways that Microsoft turned to in order to tackle the issue of piracy in China was to convince the local government and state departments to make the move to genuine licenses. The company negotiated deals to purchase Windows XP licenses only six months before this operating system reached end of support.
This, in turn, backfired for Microsoft, as China wanted extended support for Windows XP at no additional cost, a demand that was rapidly denied by the software firm. China, instead, decided to ban Windows 8 on governments computers and start an anti-trust investigation against Microsoft.
Right now, it’s pretty clear that China isn’t quite Microsoft’s preferred market, although it should be, given the huge number of computers in the country and the potential the local IT business currently has.