A recent set of data from the US Government’s Digital Analytics Program (aka DAP) shows that most of Windows 10’s growth appears to come from users switching from Windows XP or Windows 7 to the new flagship desktop OS. In a recent story entitled “Windows 7 and XP are the biggest losers with Windows 10’s rapid growth…,” Paul Hill at Neowin.net posted a very nice table of figures extracted from their downloadable source data to show what’s been up among the population of users visiting or using US Government websites sites over the course of 2015:

Numerically, Win10 is the biggest gainer for November, and Win7&XP are the biggest losers.
[Figure comes from afore-cited Neowin 11/29/15 story.]

Given that XP is only workable for those paying exorbitant post-end-of-life contract fees to MS (of which there is no shortage within some government branches and agencies), XP is clearly fading to black. That said, it continues to amaze me that an OS that hit end of life more than 18 months ago still registers so strongly on the radar. Please note that the percentages represent market share shifts, not percentages of the category/OS counts, so that you’d interpret the table to mean that Windows 7 is down by 7.0% ytd, and XP down by 2.1% ditto, while Windows 10 has gone from 0 to 12.4% over the same time period. Thus, the other items shown on the table account for the remaining 3.3% necessary to account of Windows 10’s growth.

By way of comparison, take a look at my 11/27 blog, which reviews recent desktop OS marketshare figures from NetMarketShare.com (NMS). There are differences across the board from these two different sample populations:

1. Windows 7 stands at 55.71% on NMS, and 64.2% on DAP.
2. Windows XP stands at 11.68% on NMS, and only 3.7% on DAP.
3. Windows 8.1 stands at 10.68% on NMS, and 15.7% on DAP.
4. Windows 10 is at 7.94% on NMS, but 12.4% on DAP.

I could go on, but you get the idea: the breakdown of desktop OS still varies quite a bit, according to the composition of the sample population from which its drawn. But the foregoing table shows pretty clearly that other Windows OSes are trending downward (except perhaps for Windows 8.1), while Windows 10 is trending strongly upward. I still don’t see enough momentum to get Windows 10 to the 1 Billion user mark by 2017 as per Microsoft’s stated wish, but it could be a closer call than I had originally thought. Time will surely tell!

Note:

The article was originally published by Ed Tittel @ TechTarget: IT Knowledge Exchange on December 2nd, 2015. It is reproduced on this blog with an author’s permission.