14 DAY TRIAL // May 2018 brought some pretty good news for Microsoft, as not only that Windows 10 increased its market share, but Windows 7 also declined, bringing the company’s latest desktop operating system closer to the leading spot on the PC worldwide.
Windows 7 continues to be the number one PC platform despite declining from 43.57% in April to 41.79% in May. On the other hand, Windows 10 jumped from 33.81% to 34.74% in just 30 days, and if the same trend is maintained, it could overtake the 2009 sibling by the end of the year.
For Microsoft, this would be a Godsend, as the company again has a hard time pushing users to its latest desktop operating system.
The first time this happened was in 2014 when Microsoft pulled Windows XP, despite millions of systems still running this version of the operating system.
Windows 10 April 2018 Update
With Windows 7 approaching end-of-support in January 2020, the software giant is very likely to experience similar struggles, especially because this particular OS version has until now survived the company’s aggressive Windows 10 push, including one year of free upgrades.
Windows clearly dominates the PC market, as the only non-Windows operating system in the top 5 is macOS 10.13 with a market share of 4.98%. Windows 8.1 is third with 5.31%, while Windows XP is fifth with 4.70%.
The debut of the April 2018 Update might have helped Windows 10 increase its market share, but at this point, it’s pretty hard to estimate how many users upgraded their systems following the launch of this latest version. The April update is now being pushed to computers in a gradual rollout, but manual downloads are also available for those who don’t want to wait any longer.
It usually takes approximately three months for Microsoft to complete the rollout of new Windows 10 versions, so by the end of summer, all eligible systems should be able to upgrade to April 2018 Update.