Windows 10 overtakes Windows 8.1's market share

Windows 10 overtakes Windows 8.1's market share It looks like Santa stuffed chimneys with new PCs last year Windows 10 has overtaken Windows 8.1's market share, according to all three of data sources we use to monitor such matters.

For a couple of years now we've considered monthly desktop operating system market share from StatCounter and Netmarketshare. Of late we've added data from the US government's analytics service, on grounds that US the traffic to US government web sites it measures - all 1.53 billion visits in the last 90 days - is as good a collection of public data as any other we've been able to find.

In January Uncle Same found Windows 8.1 slumping from December's 15.57 per cent of visits to US sites to a new low of 11.95 per cent. Windows 10 leapt from December's 12.85 per cent to 17.89 per cent.

Which sounds like an awful lot of new PCs packing Windows 10 appeared under the tree. As we noted last month, the US government reports daily traffic so it's possible to see patterns in weekend use versus during the working week. That view again shows that Windows 10 is doing much better on weekends than it is Monday through Friday. On weekend's Microsoft's latest is almost hitting the 30 per cent mark. Once the world goes back to work, Windows 10 returns to a range between fourteen and seventeen per cent, with occasional spikes of nineteen per cent.

Here's the tale of the tape from the US data.

Netmarketshare also has Windows 10 jumping ahead of Windows 8.1, but oddly has both growing their share.

According to the company, Windows 8.1's market share ticked up from December's 10.3 per cent share to 10.4 per cent in January. Windows 10 did rather better, lifting December's 9.96 per cent to 11.85 per cent in the new year.

StatCounter also has Windows 10 leaping ahead of 8.1. The latter dipped from 12.14 per cent to 11.67 per cent between December and January. Windows 10 grew from 11.87 per cent to 13.65 per cent over the same time.

We're guessing those jumps for Windows 10 are Santa-sized and the the jolly fat man shoved a lot of new PCs down chimneys at Christmas. Either that or lots of people took advantage of the holiday season to upgrade. Or perhaps Microsoft's increasingly insistent urgings to upgrade are being heeded.

Before we go: StatCounter has Windows XP hanging on at 7.98 per cent market share and Netmarketshare has it at 11.42 per cent. Uncle Sam has it at just 3.2 per cent and sinking. Which suggests to us that users beyond the United States could be the ones clinging to XP. ®