Microsoft’s Windows 10 has achieved one particular milestone that has been in a long time in making and that is dethroning the 10 year old Windows 7, as the world’s most used desktop operating system.
Windows 10 now holds 39.22% market share as of December 2018 compared to Windows 7’s 36.9%.
Previously projected to be running on over 1 Billion devices by its 3rd year, it only had around 300 million machines running the Operating System by 2016 and this wasn’t made rosy by the Windows Phone blow that made Microsoft cut back on these projections.
Windows 10 is now running on over 700 Million devices that include PCs, Laptops, Tablets, Xbox consoles among others, just 300 more machines short of achieving the earlier target albeit an extended time period.
Window 10 has had to battle Windows 7 that has held strong for the past 10 years even after Microsoft announced plans to end support for the OS by the January of 2020. Microsoft at one time had to give out Windows 10 for free to get its OEM partners to adopt the operating system but that didn’t have a significant impact on Windows 7 market share until now.
It also faced a similar problem with the beloved Windows XP that held strong even after Windows Vista, 8 and 8.1 launched. It wasn’t until Windows 7 came along that XP’s market started diminishing significantly.
