Windows 10 Market Relevance - Has the OS peaked ?
I write quite a bit about Windows 10. As a Fast Ring Insider since the program inception nearly 3 years ago now - I've effectively run every build leading up to the initial release in July of 2015 to today.
As a long time tech guy - I've also run every version of Windows that has ever existed and watched as MS became the dominant PC operating system on the planet.
As we approach the 5th major release of Windows 10 - The Fall Creators Update scheduled for Oct 17 - the question is the impact Windows 10 is having on the PC OS and hardware market.
So while Windows itself in all versions is still the absolute dominant PC operating system out there with a 90.7% market share over MacOS's 5.94% and Linux's 3.37% - Windows 10 seems to be peaking.
Today - the nearly 8 year old Windows 7 still holds the largest portion of the overall OS market at 48.43%. And that has actually increased marginally since the beginning of the year when it was at 47.20%
Now remember - Mainstream support for Windows 7 ended in Jan of 2015 and while extended support is effective until Jan of 2020, the latest Service Pack was SP1 released in Feb of 2011.
So even with "Patch Tuesday" plus 3rd party virus/security protection that still means that pieces of the OS potentially haven't been updated in over 6 years. So that means to me there are huge number of exposed machines out there and why some viruses spread like wildfire.
Windows 10 today maintains a 27.99% market share - but that has only increased about 2.6% from January's 25.30%. It appears that most of that gain has come from Windows XP and Windows 8 losses - mostly like due to retiring old machines.
While Windows 10 share grew rapidly in the first year to 22.99% when it was a "free" upgrade - after the Anniversary release in Aug of 2016 - the pace has slowed dramatically. Since the release of the Redstone 1 branch in Nov of 2016 market share has grown just over 4.2% from 23.72% to the 27.99% today.
Windows itself has also lost overall operating system market share to Android when back in April of 2017 Android surpassed Windows as the dominant OS across all devices. Pretty remarkable when you consider that 5 years ago Android share was at 2.4% and Windows was at 84%. As was very well said in an article on the subject - "Windows did win the Desktop - but the Battlefield moved on".
As I've observed and commented on throughout the Windows 10 development cycle was the value of features like Touch, Pen, Hello and to a lesser extent AR, 3D and Continuum a driver of adoption and new product sales. I would often ask - would you use those new features and would they be compelling enough to drive you to buy a new device that would support them.
So far the answer appears to be no. While the state of the art in PCs has advanced greatly in the past several years with multi-core CPU, fast DDR4 RAM, NVMe SSD storage, 802.11ac WiFi along with 4K displays, touch, pen and IR camera (for Hello) - PC sales themselves continue to drop. While there was a slight blip upwards in Q1 of 2017 - then trend continues to be downward - PC sales might not reach 250M units this year. Meanwhile Smartphone sales will probably exceed 1.6B units this year - a nearly 7 to 1 ratio.
Even MS's attempt at a PC line with the Surface brand of products also appears to have really not moved the needle. Several folks I know that have Surface devices are now looking elsewhere - including transitioning to Mac. While these devices did help promote the 2-in-1 design along with touch and pen - overall they are not a market force.
The larger battlefield is mobile - and unfortunately that is where MS failed badly with Windows Phone. To me the movement to mobile from PC as well as the fact that MS failed in the mobile space has reduced the relevance of Windows as a whole and Windows 10 specifically. The reason is apps.
As I've stated again and again, MS has lost an entire generation of app developers to iOS and Android and they see no reason to support Windows. It doesn't matter if the approach is UWP or the new PWA. And even with the MS partnership with Qualcomm and Windows 10 on ARM it is way too little too late.
While there have been rumors of a "Surface Phone" for years now - I doubt that it will ever come to fruition. MS seems to be content to develop apps for iOS and Android and try and push folks to their cloud services like Office 365, Azure, Bing, etc.
Bottom line is that while Windows 10 is by far the best Windows OS - it's adoption appears to be peaking and may struggle to attain more than a 30% share in the next year. It may take several more years for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 7. So far there has not been a compelling enough reason or event to accelerate Windows 10 adoption.
As a long time tech guy - I've also run every version of Windows that has ever existed and watched as MS became the dominant PC operating system on the planet.
As we approach the 5th major release of Windows 10 - The Fall Creators Update scheduled for Oct 17 - the question is the impact Windows 10 is having on the PC OS and hardware market.
So while Windows itself in all versions is still the absolute dominant PC operating system out there with a 90.7% market share over MacOS's 5.94% and Linux's 3.37% - Windows 10 seems to be peaking.
Today - the nearly 8 year old Windows 7 still holds the largest portion of the overall OS market at 48.43%. And that has actually increased marginally since the beginning of the year when it was at 47.20%
Now remember - Mainstream support for Windows 7 ended in Jan of 2015 and while extended support is effective until Jan of 2020, the latest Service Pack was SP1 released in Feb of 2011.
So even with "Patch Tuesday" plus 3rd party virus/security protection that still means that pieces of the OS potentially haven't been updated in over 6 years. So that means to me there are huge number of exposed machines out there and why some viruses spread like wildfire.
Windows 10 today maintains a 27.99% market share - but that has only increased about 2.6% from January's 25.30%. It appears that most of that gain has come from Windows XP and Windows 8 losses - mostly like due to retiring old machines.
While Windows 10 share grew rapidly in the first year to 22.99% when it was a "free" upgrade - after the Anniversary release in Aug of 2016 - the pace has slowed dramatically. Since the release of the Redstone 1 branch in Nov of 2016 market share has grown just over 4.2% from 23.72% to the 27.99% today.
Windows itself has also lost overall operating system market share to Android when back in April of 2017 Android surpassed Windows as the dominant OS across all devices. Pretty remarkable when you consider that 5 years ago Android share was at 2.4% and Windows was at 84%. As was very well said in an article on the subject - "Windows did win the Desktop - but the Battlefield moved on".
As I've observed and commented on throughout the Windows 10 development cycle was the value of features like Touch, Pen, Hello and to a lesser extent AR, 3D and Continuum a driver of adoption and new product sales. I would often ask - would you use those new features and would they be compelling enough to drive you to buy a new device that would support them.
So far the answer appears to be no. While the state of the art in PCs has advanced greatly in the past several years with multi-core CPU, fast DDR4 RAM, NVMe SSD storage, 802.11ac WiFi along with 4K displays, touch, pen and IR camera (for Hello) - PC sales themselves continue to drop. While there was a slight blip upwards in Q1 of 2017 - then trend continues to be downward - PC sales might not reach 250M units this year. Meanwhile Smartphone sales will probably exceed 1.6B units this year - a nearly 7 to 1 ratio.
Even MS's attempt at a PC line with the Surface brand of products also appears to have really not moved the needle. Several folks I know that have Surface devices are now looking elsewhere - including transitioning to Mac. While these devices did help promote the 2-in-1 design along with touch and pen - overall they are not a market force.
The larger battlefield is mobile - and unfortunately that is where MS failed badly with Windows Phone. To me the movement to mobile from PC as well as the fact that MS failed in the mobile space has reduced the relevance of Windows as a whole and Windows 10 specifically. The reason is apps.
As I've stated again and again, MS has lost an entire generation of app developers to iOS and Android and they see no reason to support Windows. It doesn't matter if the approach is UWP or the new PWA. And even with the MS partnership with Qualcomm and Windows 10 on ARM it is way too little too late.
While there have been rumors of a "Surface Phone" for years now - I doubt that it will ever come to fruition. MS seems to be content to develop apps for iOS and Android and try and push folks to their cloud services like Office 365, Azure, Bing, etc.
Bottom line is that while Windows 10 is by far the best Windows OS - it's adoption appears to be peaking and may struggle to attain more than a 30% share in the next year. It may take several more years for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 7. So far there has not been a compelling enough reason or event to accelerate Windows 10 adoption.
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