Windows 7, released in July of 2009, was a gigantic leap forward in the evolution of the desktop OS. Good enough, it turns out, that a huge number of people and organizations are still using it, despite it being nearly ten years since its release. Back in February, Statscounter proclaimed that according to its analytics, Windows 10 had finally overtaken 7 in marketshare. But these kinds of measurements are never exact. They’re based on counting users that connect to various constellations of sites and services, so there’s going to be some variation depending on who’s counting.
In December, though, rival analytics firm Netmarketshare revealed that it’s now also showing Windows 10 overtaking Windows 7 for the first time, with 39.22% share of the total OS market, with Windows 7 at 36.9% and Mac OS 10.14 at 4.73%. A surprising number of die hards (4.5%) are still on Windows XP.
When you include mobile OSes into the mix, Windows 10 is still on top, followed by Windows 7, then iOS 12.1
Well, no shit sherlock…
It had to happen sooner or later but to me the fact that it has taken this long shows that a lot of us know that it is not fit for service (still).
I have one system left that runs a MS OS and that is Server 2012R2. Even this is airgapped from the internet. Otherwise, it is a mixure of Linux and MacOS for me.
Windows XP die hard? There are still more of them than there are Windows 8.1 ones and they are almost as many as MacOS X 10.14.
Windows 7, with one year left to go for official support, is still running on about one third of all Windows systems. It will be interesting to see its market share in December 2019!
So Win7 stuck around b/c Win8’s UI and Apps sucked big time. Win10 rolled back the interface changes and lots of other stuff that occurred during Win8’s life, and only recently got to be old enough for the corporate world to really start adopting it – between stability, features, and in-house testing that the big enterprises do; not to mention that most hardware vendors are no longer really supporting Win7, and MS never rolled out USB-C support to Win7; so they kind of got forced to upgrade to something. If Win11 was out it would probably have been that instead.
Windows 10 is an OS that has been recalled, forces OS updates that regularly breaks even Microsoft’s own applications and can cause data loss, it forces functionality and UI changes on users without warning, it forces updates at incredibly inconvenient times… it’s an OS written for Microsoft, not for its customers.
The long term support version of Windows 10 is basically an afterthought for microsoft – without most of the Metro stack, it means most of Microsoft’s own apps now don’t even work properly.
It’s inevitable that just new-computer cycles would result in Windows 10 surpassing Windows 7, but the fact that it took so long, is indicative of the loss of trust Microsoft is suffering with the customer base.
Microsoft lost the mobile market. It’s barely holding on in the cloud market and that’s only thanks to some dodgy licensing arrangements and leveraging of it’s legacy base to force people into O365 and Azure, and the in the desktop market OSX/MacOS now has a better reputation amongst most consumers than Windows.
MS is going down a dangerous road.
Was it *ever* any different? MacOS/OS X had better reputation than Windows since the beginning of time itself…
(not familiar with new comment syntax, this may go horribly wrong)
Yeah. At least in business environments. Until relatively recently, unless you were a creative professional, very few people liked dealing with a Mac’s interoperability problems and quirks in a larger network.
Microsoft tended to be consistent and interoperable and manageable so it was a good tool. Not a pretty tool. But a good tool.
Microsoft’s losing that consistency now. Random combinations of Microsoft’s own apps just don’t work. Microsoft deliberately breaks things to push users into cloud services (an example I run into regularly – Outlook 2016+ autodiscover with an in-premises Exchange server will often decide to re-home itself against O365 if the user has a Microsoft account. This effectively breaks outlook and is a deliberate choice by MS they’ve actively refused to fix).
MS’s manageability is suffering – some things are only exposed via the inTune type MDM apis, some things via GPO, some via custom XML import stuff, some stuff you literally just can’t manage any more.
OSX’s interoperability issues on the other hand have mostly become irrelevant with everything moving to cloud. Much less of an issue having a desktop. I don’t even like it myself but it’s less of a problem if a customer has it now than it used to be, by far, for them and for me.
ok rant done lol
That’s weird, because in your previous post you were talking about “reputation” and “consumers”, not about “interoperability” and “corporate”. You just did a 180 degree turn here.
Nah, I’m just going more into why people are telling me they’d prefer a Mac now than a windows pc. Windows has gone from being the boring tool that everyone uses to an obstacle, and it’s ticking a lot of people I support off. Mac has gone from being an awkward, doesnt-quite-fit thing to an answer to their problems for a lot of them. I’ve talked to a lot of them and I understand why.
Interoperability and consistency directly feed into reputation of business tools, basically.
And yes, corporate customers are still “consumers”. They consume the product.
I also would prefer a Mac over Windows PC if there was any decent Mac hardware.
Going by your personal definition, maybe. But where I come from there’s a very clear distinction between “consumer market” and “corporate market”. Those are 2 very, very different product categories both in hardware and software.
That’s probably wishful thinking / maybe, sort of, in few atypical countries; but for most people macOS is simply outside their sphere of consideration – it suffices for them to mostly just know that (if anything at all) it’s too expensive; for them, PC ~= Windows, still.
If Windows 7 were still being sold in stores and available on new computers I’m sure it would be a very different story. It’s not hard for Windows 10 to take the lead when people buying computers don’t really don’t have much choice, but even then look how many years it has taken just to get to this point. It’s clearly not a well-loved operating system but Microsoft intends to keep shoveling it out anyway.
BTW, what are current OS and browsers stats for OSNews? 🙂