Just a few days ago Windows 10 achieved the milestone and finally became the most used version of Windows . However, the difference in market share between Windows 7 and Windows 10 is quite small, despite the fact that the support of the former is completely terminated on January 14, 2020 .
An exact year of life is what is left to Windows 7 thanks to its extended support phase, since standard support ended in January 2015 , but this story smells like it will be the same or very similar to Windows XP and With hundreds of millions of computers still using Windows 7, the company already had to offer security payment updates until January 2023.
How the 1000 million Windows users are distributed
In 2017, Satya Nadella, current CEO of Microsoft, revealed some interesting information about the company and about Windows. The operating system had lost about 500 million users in general , from having 1.5 billion in 2014 to just 1 billion users worldwide by 2017 .
If at that time they said that Windows 10 had 600 million installations, we could assume that most of the rest were Windows 7 installations.
And this is the current situation: according to the latest figures given by the same Microsoft during Build 2018 , by the beginning of that year Windows 10 was already in 700 million devices so the company claimed that Windows 10 already had more facilities than Windows 7 .
However, at that time, according to data from both NetMarketShare and StatCounter , Windows 7 was still the version of the most used system. What in theory would put Windows 7 with more than those 700 million installations in early 2018.
Windows 10 is more used than Windows 7, but for very, very little
Those accounts do not give if Nadella’s figures point to only 1,000 million Windows users, or Windows 10 users are new and not people moving to an earlier version, or Windows 10 does not have 700 million users, or if you have them and the market shares pointed by third parties are wrong. Actually, everything is approximate.
Currently, NetMarketShare puts Windows 7 with 36.9% market share and Windows 10 above with 39.22% . The difference is quite small, and the good news for Windows 10 is not as good as Microsoft would have liked, they expected 1,000 million devices in three years and fell short.
By January 2018 , Windows 7 had 42.39% market share and by December 2018 that share fell to 36.90%. That is a loss of users of just 5% in a year. If the trend continues at the same pace this year, or double, or even triple, by the time the extended Windows 7 support is finished it will still be installed on millions of computers and will remain the second most used desktop operating system in the world . Windows 8.1 is the third, and barely has 4.45% of the current quota.
Windows Xp
Who remain using Windows 7 for this same date next year should be prepared to stay without any security update and expose themselves to a huge amount of risk.
Those who have Windows 7 Professional or Enterprise licenses by volume, will have the option to pay Microsoft for extended support until 2023, but the company already warned that the price would increase every year .
Windows 7 is the new Windows XP
Windows 10 is not perfect, but it is in a state of maturity much greater than three years ago in its infancy. Upgrading from Windows 7 is very simple, and ten years of support for a system is not exactly short.
But, probably the history of Windows XP will be repeated, and we will spend a long period of users and companies who refuse to update until the last moment, who find out today or in a year that the support ends in 2020. After all , two years before retiring, Windows XP still had more than 51% of the market share, 1% less than Windows 7 last year .