Despite Microsoft's best efforts, Windows 11 continues to lag behind its predecessor in market share by a significant margin, at least according to one company's market analysis. Statcounter has released a new report on global operating system market share based on analyzing 5 billion page views for systems connecting to 1.5 million websites. Its analysis shows Windows 10 is still dominating its successor and that Windows 11 has barely made a dent in this arrangement.
According to Statcounter's newest figures, Windows 10 enjoys a healthy 71.62% market share despite originally coming to market in 2015. At the same time, Windows 11—launched two years ago on Oct. 5, 2021—is seemingly stuck in the 20% range, with its market share barely increasing for almost all of 2023. As PCWorld notes, Windows 11's complacency is a surprise since all new PCs have been shipping with Windows 11 for some time now, giving us reason to view these numbers cautiously. What's also notable is the market share numbers for both OSes have barely moved for most of 2023, which is surprising.
Windows 11 broke through the 20% barrier for the first time in March. It rose to 23% soon after, but now that it's October, it's languishing at 23.64%, its growth having seemingly flatlined. The same can be said for Windows 10, which saw its share of the pie decline almost 3% in the same time frame, going down to 71% and staying there throughout the year.
The biggest drop in the numbers is for Windows 7, which saw a precipitous decline from 11% in December 2022 to its current share of just 3%, where it's stayed for all of 2023. That just shows you the staying power of Microsoft's more popular OSes, as Windows 7 was released in 2009 and taken off life support in 2020.
Of course, these are just the numbers from Statcounter, not Microsoft. They're also just what they see when computers connect to websites they analyze, so they're not a complete picture of the industry. However, the sample size is large enough to give us useful information and confirm that Windows 11 remains unpopular compared with its predecessor. To put it lightly, Windows 11 has proven to be a controversial OS, and it seems many people are just not ready to "upgrade" yet. However, Microsoft will take Windows 10 out behind the barn in 2025, so the clock is ticking for the holdouts.
