The free offer for Windows 10 has expired, but Microsoft’s latest operating system is continuing to do well in the market, seeing another uptick during the month of August. As the Anniversary Update finally began rolling out, Windows 10’s market share continued to grow and now sits at a respectable 23%, up from 21% in July.
Recently, we saw how Windows 10 was just about to break the 50% usage mark on Steam. Now, according to data from NetMarketShare, Microsoft’s operating system is nearly on a quarter of all desktop systems out there. Given that the OS is just over a year old this is a very impressive feat. And the trend seems to be positive for Microsoft, with Windows 10 continuing to gain market share, even with users having to pay for the OS.
Meanwhile, Windows 7 and even Windows 8.1 also saw very modest bumps in usage, with the first one gaining 0.25% market share, and the latter gaining 0.1%, which falls in the error range. According to this data Windows XP lost around 1 percent of its users between July and August, similar to Mac OS X 10.11 which saw a decline of 0.30%.
Given that Microsoft was forced to abandon its plan to have Windows 10 on a billion devices very soon, this news is no doubt a breath of fresh air for the company. With Windows 10 doing well now, and the promise of lots of new sales during the back-to-school and holiday seasons, Microsoft’s OS will likely continue to gain more market share by the end of the year.
Source: NetMarketShare