By Joel Hruska
Earlier this month, we reported on Windows 10’s slow growth rate,
despite Microsoft’s decision to pull out all the stops on pushing
customers to upgrade to the new operating system. Three weeks ago,
Microsoft pushed a “security” fix for IE11 that was actually a Windows 10 update notification in disguise
(this is generally frowned upon, since mixing security updates and
non-security updates increases the chance that you’ll break something
new while patching something else).
ComputerWorld reports
that as of late last week, Windows 10 devices had broken 20% of the
market for the first time. The current data shows that figure has
dropped again very slightly, to roughly 19.5%, but the real-time figures
may not reflect the historic values.
Windows only has 52% market share, so 10.1% of total accesses from Windows 10 works out to 19.5% of Windows-specific accesses.
The graph above is from the real-time information captured this afternoon, and it shows Windows 10
hovering around the 20% mark. That’s still an improvement for
Microsoft, which has added a few percentage points of market share over
the past three months. Since the Digital Analytics Program
measures visits to government websites and is much more heavily used on
weekends, it may also be underreporting Windows 10 usage. For now, W10
deployments are mostly focused in the home; many enterprises have
continued using Windows 7 and will deploy Windows 10 later in the year.
So far, most of Windows 10’s growth has come at the expense of Windows 8
/ 8.1. It’s also noteworthy that government websites, which aren’t
known for being cutting-edge or mobile-friendly, only report a 52%
market share for the premiere corporate operating system.
With that said, Windows 10 growth isn’t the sprinting power
house Microsoft would like it to be. At current rates, the company will
hit roughly 26% adoption by the end of the free one-year upgrade period.
That’s a significant install base, but it would be far below the one
billion target Microsoft set for itself.
Difficult choices ahead
We’ve talked before about how Microsoft may handle the end
of its upgrade period this July, but that was before Universal Windows
Platform applications began to debut. Now that we’ve seen how
cross-platform applications between the Xbox One and PC actually behave,
the verdict isn’t (currently) very good.
Gamers are, in absolute terms, only a fraction of Windows
10’s install base, but they tend to be a noisy and important fraction.
Converting these users into Windows Store buyers has to be a huge goal
for Microsoft, since it allows the company to tap purchases that would
ordinarily flow to platforms like Steam. This was the fear that drove
Gabe Newell to create Steam OS, and it’s still a potential threat to the
Valve empire. Today, UWP applications like Gears of War have an
exceptionally poor reputation, but Steam itself was widely loathed
at launch. Over time, Valve turned its initially despised platform into
practically the only digital distribution point for PC titles.
Microsoft could theoretically do something similar, but only if it
starts offering PC gamers the kinds of choices and options they are used
to. The tight sandboxing model doesn’t just preclude modding, it
prevents the kinds of common INI tweaks that PC gamers have used for
decades when dealing with slipshod software or poor console ports.
While this problem has since been patched, the game debuted in unplayable shape on AMD GPUs and it’s still not great.
Plenty of players who never mod their games have
nevertheless needed to adjust field-of-view (FOV) settings, tweak mouse
acceleration, or change image quality settings that aren’t exposed in
game menus. Sometimes such changes merely make a game more convenient,
other times they’re practically required to make it playable. This can
crop up in unexpected places; the hard-lock on Gears of War’s INI files
made it impossible for us to prove hardware PhysX wasn’t running in that
game by flipping the variable on and off via INI. We were able to
demonstrate that there was no PhysX-related issue through alternate approaches, but in other situations those options may not be available.
As ComputerWorld points out, whether or not Microsoft
continues its free upgrade policy past July 29 will have trickle-down
effects on device sales and overall W10 uptake, yes — but whether or not
the company changes its UWP and privacy policies to allow users to
change some of these settings could have an impact, too. If Microsoft is
truly serious about pushing its adoption rate towards that one billion
threshold, it may need to take actions that hold-out groups want to see.
If it doesn’t, it risks creating the same situation on Windows 7 that
bedeviled it with Windows XP — a large chunk of users who simply won’t
update, and drag down the movement of the overall Windows ecosystem as a
result.
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