Windows 11 market share declines, users shift back to Windows 10

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/windows-11-market-share-declines-as-users-seemingly-shift-back-to-windows-10

The people writing these articles need to think a bit more about what they are posting, rather than just rehashing something they saw posted elsewhere online. It should be obvious just from the chart in the article that the statcounter data is flawed, and most definitely not accurate enough to interpret meaningful month-to-month trends from. There's no logical reason why the number of systems running Windows 8.1 would have randomly rose significantly for a few months, only to drop back to almost nothing immediately thereafter. That should be a red flag that the data is unreliable right there.

Likewise, seeing Windows 11 usage slowly rising over the course of a year, while Windows 10 usage was slowly dropping, only for the two to reverse direction within the last couple months. Clearly, people are not moving from Windows 11 to Windows 10 in significant numbers, at least not enough to reverse the overall trend. This could be anything from a browser not reporting accurate OS data, to statcounter getting added to some popular website in a country with a larger install base of older systems. Keep in mind that statcounter is used on less than 1% of websites, and counts individual page views rather than unique systems, so there's a lot of room for inaccuracy to come into play.

As for people not adopting Windows 11 all that quickly, that makes perfect sense. Generally, most won't see the need to go out of their way to update their OS to a new version unless they are moving to a new PC that just happens to have it preinstalled, and there are still many perfectly functional systems that can't install the updated OS due to hardware restrictions. And there hasn't really been much of a pressing need to upgrade to newer hardware over the last couple years, with existing hardware still being very capable of handing most people's needs, and with many who were looking to upgrade having already done so around the time of the lockdowns. And Windows 11 so far hasn't done all that much beyond being Windows 10 with a new coat of paint, so those outside of the tech community haven't exactly had much incentive to try it on their existing systems.

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  "title": "Windows 11 market share declines, users shift back to Windows 10",
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{
  "author": "Roshan Ashraf Shaikh",
  "date": "2024-05-02T15:16:16.000Z",
  "description": "Microsoft still can’t make users shift to Windows 11",
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  "publisher": "Tom's Hardware",
  "title": "Windows 11 market share declines as users seemingly shift back to Windows 10",
  "url": "https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/windows-11-market-share-declines-as-users-seemingly-shift-back-to-windows-10"
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{
  "url": "https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/windows-11-market-share-declines-as-users-seemingly-shift-back-to-windows-10",
  "title": "Windows 11 market share declines as users seemingly shift back to Windows 10",
  "description": "The people writing these articles need to think a bit more about what they are posting, rather than just rehashing something they saw posted elsewhere online. It should be obvious just from the chart in the...",
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  ],
  "image": "https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/jmdsJnub5M5ePcegPAKQKQ-1200-80.jpg",
  "content": "<div><p>\nThe people writing these articles need to think a bit more about what they are posting, rather than just rehashing something they saw posted elsewhere online. It should be obvious just from the chart in the article that the statcounter data is flawed, and most definitely not accurate enough to interpret meaningful month-to-month trends from. There's no logical reason why the number of systems running Windows 8.1 would have randomly rose significantly for a few months, only to drop back to almost nothing immediately thereafter. That should be a red flag that the data is unreliable right there.</p><p>\nLikewise, seeing Windows 11 usage slowly rising over the course of a year, while Windows 10 usage was slowly dropping, only for the two to reverse direction within the last couple months. Clearly, people are not moving from Windows 11 to Windows 10 in significant numbers, at least not enough to reverse the overall trend. This could be anything from a browser not reporting accurate OS data, to statcounter getting added to some popular website in a country with a larger install base of older systems. Keep in mind that statcounter is used on less than 1% of websites, and counts individual page views rather than unique systems, so there's a lot of room for inaccuracy to come into play.</p><p>\nAs for people not adopting Windows 11 all that quickly, that makes perfect sense. Generally, most won't see the need to go out of their way to update their OS to a new version unless they are moving to a new PC that just happens to have it preinstalled, and there are still many perfectly functional systems that can't install the updated OS due to hardware restrictions. And there hasn't really been much of a pressing need to upgrade to newer hardware over the last couple years, with existing hardware still being very capable of handing most people's needs, and with many who were looking to upgrade having already done so around the time of the lockdowns. And Windows 11 so far hasn't done all that much beyond being Windows 10 with a new coat of paint, so those outside of the tech community haven't exactly had much incentive to try it on their existing systems.\n</p></div>",
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  "published": "2024-05-02T15:16:16Z",
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