Despite Microsoft’s push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant’s latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.
This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.
I’ll admit to some ‘asterisk’ to that.
So a developer evangelist said “because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10”. So the media ran with the most intuitive interpretation of that language and expanded on it and declared that Microsoft was basically changing to a rolling release model. Note that folks say “he meant latest, not last”.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s formal lifecycle statement said, from the onset, that it wasn’t going to be supported in 10 years.
However, Microsoft did nothing to clarify the rampant coverage. So I’m still on the side of “the popular impression among people was eternally supported rolling release”. Just acknowledging that, formally, they did designate 10 the same way they had designated previous versions.
I agree with you fully, and that’s my main point. Their own forums were full of the question being repeatedly asked and dismissed, granted by “MVP’s” or independent advisors who have no link to the internal development or plans, they should have stepped up their messaging. The enterprise I work for pays them a fuckton of money, and we even have our own dedicated account reps who sang the same tune those fuckers on the forums did, and they were legit Microsoft employees. When W10’s EOL was announced they sent over a lot of gift baskets to our VP’s over that shit, because we knew how many mission critical systems we had that just got fucked in the ass, and our budgetary outlays just changed.
Complete fucking asshole move, and it could’ve been much better if the messaging were just handled differently.
Yeah, I strongly suspect there was a camp within Microsoft that was 100% pushing for ‘rolling release’ model for the OS versus another traditionalist camp that said there would be new major upgrades. Further, I bet rather than reconciling those perspectives, they just let both camps continue on under their own assumption, until eventually the traditionalists won out and got ‘Windows 11’, finalizing which way the company was going to actually go.