14 DAY TRIAL // One of Microsoft’s biggest challenges these days is to move people off Windows 7, and it appears that at least in the United States, this mission is partially successful.
Data provided by StatCounter for the month of January 2017 indicates that Windows 10 has managed to overtake Windows 7 in Microsoft’s home market, reaching a market share of 30.99 percent, as compared to 30.98 percent for its 2009 predecessor.
For what it’s worth, macOS is the third operating system in the chart with 19.51 percent, followed by Windows 8.1 with 5.92 percent, and Windows 8 with 3.74 percent. Chrome OS is the surprising appearance this time with 3.04 percent of the market, while Windows XP is finally declining and is now at 2.07 percent.
The Windows 10 push
So while Microsoft is pushing hard for users to move to Windows 10, the company’s second biggest priority is to convince its customers to abandon Windows 7 by the time it reaches end of support.
Windows 7, which still powers 3 out of 10 computers if these statistics are accurate, will reach end of life in 2020, so Microsoft still has some 3 years to accomplish its goal.
Undoubtedly, however, convincing users to upgrade from Windows 7 will be a difficult mission, especially because the 30 percent that are still running the platform decided to stick with it despite the free Windows 10 upgrade offer that was available in the first 12 months after the launch of the latest OS.
Microsoft is concerned that in 2020 it could experience another Windows XP moment and users could refuse to upgrade. Back in April 2014 when Microsoft pulled support for XP, the OS was still running on more than 20 percent of the world’s PCs, despite all the efforts to emphasize the risks of sticking with an unsupported platform.
The same could happen with Windows 7 too, so Microsoft needs to play its card right and try to upgrade users to Windows 10 a lot sooner than it did in Windows XP’s case.