14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 10 was launched with much fanfare in July 2015, and since then Microsoft has been pushing everyone to at least give it a try, so it's no surprise that it had one of the fastest adoption rates of all Windows versions.
But it's also no secret that in the last few months, Windows 10's growth has slowed down a little and a bunch of statistics provided by Net Applications for the last month of 2015 shows that Windows 10 ended the year below the 10 percent threshold.
In fact, Windows 10 was powering 9.96 percent of the desktop PCs last month, which makes it the fourth most-used operating system on this platform, after Windows 7, XP, and 8.1.
Windows XP still in top
The shocking fact is that Windows XP continues to remain the second top desktop OS in the world, but if the same trends are maintained in the next few months, it's very likely to fall onto the fourth place.
Right now, Windows 7 continues to be the leader with 55.68 percent, which means that it powers more than half of the planet's PCs. Windows XP is second with 10.93 percent while Windows 8.1 is third with 10.30 percent.
Windows 10, however, is expected to experience accelerated growth in 2016, as Microsoft will make it a recommended download in Windows Update, so more users could perform the upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1. At the same time, 2016 is also the year when more enterprises are expected to start the migration to Windows 10, so its share should see a huge boost given the fact that hundreds or thousands of computers could be upgraded at once.
Microsoft has a goal of bringing Windows 10 on 1 billion devices by the end of this year, so these next 12 months are really going to be very challenging for the Redmond-based tech giant.