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Windows 10 grabbed about five per cent market share in August

Unless this really is the year of the Linux desktop ...

Windows 10 looks to have grabbed about five and a half per cent of the desktop operating system market in August, its first full month of release.

We're not quite giving it a firm number because the two organisations whose numbers we report each month, StatCounter and Netmarketshare, are producing some statistical oddities at present.

Netmarketshare is particularly unhelpful because it didn't record Windows 10 data for August. The company did, however, record a big bump for “other” operating systems, up from 6.92 per cent in July to 11.48 per cent in August.

We're guessing most of the rise in “other” was Windows 10, since it seems unlikely that Linux has suddenly become more than statistical noise in desktop data.

The firm also reported a dip or Windows 7 from 60.73 per cent to 57.67 percent and a drop from 13.11 per cent to 11.39 per cent for Windows 8.1. That's a combined drop of 4.78 per cent and a 4.56 per cent rise in “other”.

If there's a better theory than Windows 10 grabbing somewhere around 4.6 per cent of market share from that data, let us know in the comments.

StatCounter has Windows 10 at 5.38 per cent for the month, but 6.69 per cent for the week ending August 30th. The monthly data includes the first few days of August, when Windows 10 installs were gathering pace, hence the lower monthly figure.

StatCounter has Windows 7 down from 54.64 per cent market share to 53.01 per cent and Windows 8.1 taking a sharper dip from 16.84 per cent to 14.37 per cent.

Do the numbers stack up? Microsoft's said Windows 10 has landed on 75 million devices. Intel's recently said, in the course of launching Skylake, that the world is home to a billion PCs that are more than three years old. About 300 million new PCs ship each year so if we consider a population of two billion PCs capable of running Windows 10 and a claimed population of 75 million on Windows 10 that would mean about three and a half per cent on Windows 10.

Whenever we consider StatCounter and Netmarketshare's numbers we remark on their methodological vagaries. Let's also consider that older PCs might not touch the sites both services use to measure market share as often as newer machines. So around five per cent market share doesn't look a badly wrong guess for Windows 10's progress. ®

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