Windows 10 is on 132 million PCs, growth continues to slow

Compared to the milestone of 110 million devices running Windows 10 after 2 months, last October the Windows 10 army only increased by 21 million devices.

Windows 10 is still the fastest growing operating system version in Microsoft's history, surpassing even Windows 7, thanks to the first month of explosive PC upgrades to Windows 10 thanks to the company's free policy.

After 3 months of release, Windows 10 is present on 132 million PCs, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.

That represents a 7.9 percent share of all PCs worldwide. Windows 10's market share increased by 1.3 percentage points in October, down from a 1.4 percentage point increase in September and well below the record 4.8 percentage points in August, the first month Windows 10 was released.

Microsoft released Windows 10 on July 29, and by the end of October it had been exactly 3 months. In the past 3 months, the number of PCs with Windows 10 installed was mainly upgraded from old machines running Windows 7, Windows 8 or 8.1.

If we only count Windows PCs, Windows 10 had an 8.8% market share in October, up 1.5 percentage points. Windows PCs now account for about 90.4% of all PCs worldwide.

The 132 million Windows 10 PC user figure calculated by Net Applications is based on the 1.5 billion Windows devices worldwide figure that Microsoft often cites.

Microsoft hasn't released Windows 10 user numbers since October 6, when the company said there were 110 million devices running the latest operating system.

Net Applications' Windows 10 user market share data shows a slowing trend in Windows 10's growth. This also coincides with observations from Irish company StatCounter, but StatCounter's data shows a stronger decline.

According to StatCounter, Windows 10 user market share increased by 1.4 percentage points last month, down sharply from the 2.4 percentage point increase the previous month.

Net Applications data shows that on average, there were about 706,000 devices installed Windows 10 every day in October, lower than the 794,000 devices in September.

There are 132 million PCs running Windows 10, which is about 68% of Windows XP PCs and 56% of Windows 8/8.1 PCs, still far behind Windows 7's market share.

Still, in the first three months, Windows 10 grew faster than Windows 7 – Microsoft’s most successful operating system – which only accounted for 8.2% of all Windows PCs after its first three months of release. But the difference was still quite small, 8.8% market share compared to 8.2%, compared to a 1 percentage point difference after two months between the two operating systems.

With around 132 million devices running Windows 10, Microsoft is only 13.2% of its target of reaching 1 billion devices by mid-2018.

It seems that this goal is not easy to "swallow". Recently, there has been a phenomenon of Microsoft trying to "force" PC users running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to automatically upgrade to Windows 10.

According to PCWorld