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.
Most people care about knowing how to use their OS, with as few changes as possible. If they use Windows at work, they will most likely get Windows if they have a computer at home.
If you have ever taught someone how to print and it took 5 minutes. You should know why they want it to be as close to the same at every computer they step up too.
Some people hate search functions but at the end of the day I use the keyboard for most things. So if I’m on a Windows machine, I want to be able to hit the windows key and start typing cmd, outlook, whatever. On a Mac cmd space, and start typing disk utility, or whatever it is. If I walk up to any Windows or Mac in the last 10 years and approach it that way it will work. If I walk up to a new Linux distro, I can only remember terminal, and then I have to glance around to figure out what browsers might be on it, what software names exist to figure out what I actually need for file formats etc.
If it is my home computer, that’s fine. I will know what flavor of each application I have installed and have it set up in a way that is quick usage.
If I walk into a library and it had that, it likely would double the time needed to get done whatever it was I needed to do. People want uniform working devices across all work machines and public settings. It sucks that it is owned by the rich, but I don’t see that changing overnight.