Microsoft's aggressive campaign to upgrade older PCs to Windows 10 appears to be working.
That's the inescapable conclusion from the latest data from two commercial web analytics services and the U.S. Government's open analytics program.
JASON PERLOW
Waiting until you have a catastrophic failure or a major security event to upgrade your system is never a best practice.
For this story, I've gathered the latest data, covering the months of March through May 2016, from Net Applications (aka Net Market Share), StatCounter Global Stats, and the United States Government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP). For the first two, I removed non-Windows operating systems from the data set and then normalized the results so that all the comparisons show the share for each version of Windows based on a population of all Windows PCs.
Rather than rely on the oversimplified bar and pie charts that Net Market Share and StatCounter publish each month, I downloaded the raw data from all three sources and analyzed it carefully.
Remarkably, all three sources are in general agreement. Among the population of Windows-based desktop PCs, laptops, and tablets, Windows 10 usage has doubled in the past six months, with all other versions down noticeably.
The following chart shows the DAP data for November 2015 and May 2016, which measures hundreds of millions of visits per month to public websites. There's no statistical manipulation, as with the commercial analytics services. (For a discussion of what's in the DAP numbers, see the note at the end of this earlier article: "U.S. Government data shows Windows 10 usage climbing as Windows 7 share drops sharply.")
Data from the U.S. Government Digital Analytics Program shows Windows 10 usage up, all other versions down.
As you can see, more than 25 percent of all Windows PCs that accessed U.S. Government websites in May were running Windows 10 (the list of websites includes NASA's popular Picture of the Day, National Weather Service forecasts, U.S. passport and immigration services, the Social Security Administration, and and the Internal Revenue Service).
The numbers from Net Applications and StatCounter show similar trends:
According to Net Applications, 9.8 percent of all Windows PCs were running Windows 10 in November 2015. That number is up to 19.4 percent in May 2016.
For StatCounter, the corresponding numbers jumped from 11.9 percent last November to 23.6 percent in May 2016.