Back in June of last year, we reported that somewhere around forty percent of businesses were looking to adopt Windows 10 in the first year of availability. Now that the OS has been available for free for the last six months, things seem to be going according to plan and the operating system is making a strong showing.
According to a Spiceworks survey among IT pros, first highlighted by WinBeta, Microsoft’s Windows 10 is pretty much on target to hit the 40% adoption rate by July of 2016. That’s 40% among business users, not general consumers, though Windows 10 is also making inroads among general users. Currently, Windows 10 adoption among SMBs and other professional environments seems to be somewhere around the 18% mark.
Broken down among different company types, it looks like Windows 10 is mostly being adopted by large companies with over 500 employees, with smaller businesses still only in the testing phases. And speaking of testing, it looks like 40% of those trying out Windows 10 have moved past the initial trial phase and have rolled out Windows 10 on three or more machines inside the company. That’s a good sign for Microsoft’s OS which is seemingly successful in test environments, and subsequently being deployed on production machines.
Back in January, Microsoft triumphantly announced to the world that Windows 10 had been installed on 200 million devices, less than six months after the OS launched. That’s considerably faster than Windows 8, which needed 15 months to reach that level of popularity, and half the time that Windows 7 took to reach the same sales mark.
Also mentioned at the time, was the fact that 76% of the company’s enterprise customers were actively testing Windows 10. Now with these latest numbers from SMBs and other professional environments, which don’t qualify as enterprise, it looks like Microsoft’s latest OS is very much on track to reach both the 1 billion mark that Microsoft is after, and the 40% penetration rate in business environments in the first year, that IT pros self-reported last summer.
Source and charts: Spiceworks