Net Applications sifts through Internet traffic to estimate market share for browsers, operating systems, and search engines, and according to their analysis, Windows 10’s share of the desktop OS market has jumped to 6.63%. This represents a significant jump from a 5.21% share in August, Windows 10’s first full month on the market.
With reportedly over 100 million machines running Windows 10, it continues to advance in marke share, and the new data pushes Microsoft’s OS well past its primarily desktop rival in OS X, which sits at 4.91%. Windows 7 remains the most popular desktop OS with 56.63% (down from 57.67%) market share. Windows XP (12.21%, up from 12.14%) and Windows 8.1 (10.72%, down from 11.39%) round out the top 5.
Microsoft is striving to put Windows 10 on over a billion machines, and they’re well on they’re way. We can anticipate a slowing in the rate of adoption as the low hanging fruit of early adopters is exhausted. At the same time, any glut of Windows 8.X machines in OEM and retail inventories should dry up at some point, meaning that every new machine will soon be adding to Windows 10’s market share.
