Monitoring the Adoption of Windows 10

StatCounter gives us an easy way for us to monitor the growth of Windows 10 instalments.

StatCounter os US daily 20150727 20150802

Note the rise of the black Win10 line. Windows 10 web usage will soon surpass Window XP and it has already surpassed Windows 8.0. Although it is dangerous to simply extrapolate the data, it is possible that Windows 10 instalments will exceed Windows 8.0 + 8.1 in August.

The decline of Windows 7 usage over the weekend is not indicative of Windows 7 machines being upgraded to Windows 10. This is simply a result of Windows 7 machines being used mostly in the workplace on weekdays. Due to the weekly cycles of usage and normal fluctuations in the data, we will have to observe web usage data for at least a few weeks to confidently detect a decrease in Windows 7 usage.

In the above analysis, I used web usage data from StatCounter that was restricted to the United States. The reasons for this are simple.

  1. The “Worldwide” statistics for StatCounter are not representative of actual worldwide usage, nor do they try to be. For that matter, Net Market Share statistics aren’t much better either.
  2. The United States is the most likely the largest single market for Windows.
  3. Countries where high-speed Internet access is less common will be slow to upgrade, irrespective of the appeal of Windows 10. The rate of adoption of Windows 10 in these countries cannot be a measure of how well it will fare long term. Just for your information, there is significant variation in the early adoption of Windows 10 according to StatCounter. Countries like the US (4.3% as of Aug. 2), the UK (6.3%), Germany (4.9%) and Sweden (5.0%) have a high adoption rate. Japan, France, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Russia have lower rates. However, given the sample bias in StatCounter, I would not take these differences too seriously.

Although not yet clear enough to be certain, there does seem to already be a small but visible reduction of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 web usage in Sweden, where Windows 10 adoption seems to be particularly rapid.


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