Windows 11 may get all the headlines and fascinating new features, but Windows 10 continues to dominate overall market share.
Statcounter has once again analyzed its figures to see what market shares the respective Windows variants claim. The evaluation is based on more than 5 billion page views per month from the Statcounter network of more than 1.5 million websites worldwide.
The figures presented for September 2023 no doubt spoil the day for someone at Microsoft headquarters. Windows 10 remains substantially ahead of its successor, while Windows 11 is only very slowly gaining market share. Considering that modern computers are usually delivered with Windows 11 and that in most business deployments, all PCs are sometimes switched to Windows 11 in one go, the still large lead of Windows 10 is astonishing.
How Windows 11, 10, and 7 compare
According to Statcounter, Windows 10 was running on 71.62 percent of all Windows computers in its network on September 2023. This figure hardly moved since October 2022, though there have been fluctuations; Windows 10 had a 73.46 percent share in March 2023 and 67.95 percent in December 2022. But in 2023 Windows 10 never slipped below the 71 percent mark.
Windows 11 has been making gains since September 2022, but the gains have been very slow. In September 2022, Windows 11 was running on 13.61 percent of all Windows PCs surveyed. It was not until March 2023 that Windows 11 broke the 20 per cent barrier (20.95 percent) and has since stagnated at around or just over 23 per cent.
Microsoft has not provided any updates for Windows 7 for a long time, so it’s a massive security risk. While 10.63 percent of surveyed users were still using Windows 7 in September 2022, the number of users declined significantly in January 2023 when companies could no longer pay for extended support plans. In September 2023, Statcounter put Windows 7 at a 3.33 percent share.
The similarly unsupported Windows XP and Windows 8.1 play no role: their market shares are 0.34 percent and 0.61 percent.
Desktop operating systems overall: Windows … and then not much
Taking all operating system versions together, Microsoft’s operating system held its own on 68.41 percent of all desktop computers in September 2023. Apple’s macOS X, on the other hand, had a total of only 20.15 percent last month. Linux, on the other hand, is only just above the perception threshold at 3.02 percent, while ChromeOS is barely more successful at 3.89 percent.
This article was translated from German to English and originally appeared on pcwelt.de.
Author: Hans-Christian Dirscherl, Managing Editor, PC-WELT
Hans-Christian Dirscherl began his IT life with Autoexec.bat and config.sys, Turbo-Pascal and C, Sinix and Wordperfect. He has been writing on almost all IT topics for around 25 years, covering everything from news to reviews and buying guides.