Windows 11 continues slog up the Windows 10 mountain

Windows 11 continues to nibble at the market share of Windows 10, although has a way to go before finally surpassing its predecessor.

According to figures from Statcounter, Windows 11 has continued the months-long trend of slightly increasing market share, while that of Windows 10 slides. For August 2024, the stats service recorded a month-on-month sub-one percent uptick for Windows 11 to 31.63 percent. Windows 10’s share dropped by a similar amount to 64.14 percent.

There’s a clear trend, but it will need to accelerate if Windows 11 is to overhaul Windows 10 by October 2025, when Microsoft pulls support for the venerable OS.

There are several reasons why users are steering clear of Microsoft’s latest OS. One is the hardware requirements, which rendered hardware that would otherwise be perfectly capable of running Windows 11 instantly obsolete.

Another reason is simple apathy. Although there is little glaringly wrong with Windows 11, there is also no killer feature driving its adoption.

Microsoft marketeers might mumble something about AI, but many businesses have yet to see the huge productivity gains promised by purveyors of the tech, and others have hit pause on deployments of tools such as Microsoft Copilot amid fears over data governance and inadvertent surfacing of confidential information.

Even a supposed killer feature, Windows Recall, was previously yanked due data security and privacy fears. It might turn up later this year after first being checked out by Windows Insiders.

The good news for Microsoft is that in a recent survey of 750,000 Windows endpoints, the vast majority of machines were capable of running Windows 11. The bad news is that many administrators are holding off on deployment amid concerns about readiness.

In October, it will be three years since Windows 11 debuted. Windows 10 was released in July 2015. While direct comparisons are tricky for a variety of reasons, not least because Windows 8 and 8.1 didn’t exactly bounce up the market share charts, Windows 10 was comfortably ahead of Windows 7 at this point in its life cycle: 47.25 percent in July 2018 compared to 39.06 percent for Windows 7.

Even with the modest gains recorded by Statcounter, there are no official usage figures from Microsoft. Windows 11 is far from being in the same position as Windows 10. ®