14 DAY TRIAL // Santa brought Microsoft the biggest achievement in a long time, as Windows 10 managed to overtake Windows 7 and become the world’s number one desktop operating system.
Figures provided by NetMarketShare reveal that Windows 10 is now the leading desktop OS with a market share of 39.22 percent, already significantly ahead of Windows 7 which is the runner-up with 36.90 percent.
The two operating systems are leading the charts with a total market share of 76.12 percent, which means that nearly 8 in 10 PCs out there are running either Windows 10 or Windows 7.
Third in the charts is macOS 10.14 with 4.73 percent, followed by Windows XP and Windows 8.1 with 4.54 and 4.45 percent, respectively.
Windows 10 now more popular than Windows 7
Microsoft launched Windows 10 in July 2015 with an optimistic goal of installing it on more than 1 billion devices by the end of the fiscal year 2017. While the company is still far from achieving this milestone, Windows 10 is growing steadily, and now powers more than 700 million devices, according to Microsoft’s last count.
Windows 10 was originally offered as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.1 devices, but the campaign barely generated any difference in terms of market share.
At the same time, the new OS feature updates didn’t increase the adoption rate of Windows 10 in a substantial manner, but instead helped refine the operating system in a way that eventually convinced more users to upgrade their devices.
At this point, the most recent Windows 10 feature update is called October 2018 Update, also known as version 1809, and instead of convincing more users to upgrade, it most likely made many stick with their current installations due to a huge number of bugs.
Version 1809 is now up for grabs for all users from Windows Update as a manual download.