With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

Statcounter figures show Windows 11 losing user love

Microsoft's 2025 is off to a bad start amid statistics that show users are still giving Windows 11 a wide berth as Windows 10 continues to dominate the desktop operating system market.

Figures for December 2024 from Statcounter – used because Microsoft rarely shares usage data unless it has something to boast about – confirm Windows 10's market share has inched up to 62.7 percent compared to the previous month while Windows 11's share fell back to 34.12 percent (from 34.94 percent in November 2024).

Even though Windows 11's percentage of the pie is still bigger than it was this time last year (when Statcounter pegged it at 26.54 percent), the fact the new OS is still nowhere near to overtaking Windows 10 may alarm some Microsoft executives.

The problem isn't so much the well documented complaints over Windows 11's hardware compatibility requirements – users need a relatively recent CPU and TPM 2.0 to run the operating system – but rather the increase in the market share of Windows 10. One theory is the earlier, higher numbers logged for October were partially down to users who were "trying out" Windows 11, but then decided they did not like what they saw, and went back to Windows 10.

Or it might be something to do with hardware pre-installed with Windows 10.

Canalys analyst, Kieren Jessop, noted that when looking at the more than 230 countries and regions tracked by Statcounter, Windows 10 share had actually only increased in just under a quarter of them, but that increase made an outsized impacted. Jessop cited the example of the US, where Windows 10 market share had gone from 58 percent in October 2024 to 67 percent in December.

Jessop had some theories about the cause, and told The Register, "It is likely driven by requirements by enterprises, public institutions, and maybe some consumer purchasing of Win10 pre-installed boxes.

"It's not uncommon for Enterprises to downgrade their newly procured Win11 devices to Win10 as part of their IT refresh cycles, favouring stability and compatibility with existing systems. Enterprises do this until they are ready to update their entire fleet to Win11. As for public institutions, this pattern of downgrading to Win10 is more common.

Jessop added, "For the US, I wouldn't be surprised if the upcoming Trump administration has prompted some device purchases in government, preparing for the possibility of severe budget cuts."

Many editions of Windows 10 are due to drop out of free support on October 14, 2025. Affected users will then have the option to purchase Extended Security Updates (ESU) to keep the lights on a little longer or keep using the operating system and risk falling foul of unpatched vulnerabilities.

The Register asked Microsoft what it made of the figures, if there were any official usage statistics, and whether it would consider changing the hardware requirements of Windows 11, but the company has yet to respond.

Another option would be to tack on an extra year or so of mainstream support. There are long term servicing channel (LTSC) versions of Windows 10 that will remain in support past the 2025 cut-off date, but a move to those would mean reverting to an earlier version of Windows 10. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 is, for example, equivalent to the GA release of Windows 10 21H2. The current GA version of Windows 10 is 22H2.

Statcounter's figures are calculated based on more than five billion page views per month by users worldwide on its 1.5 million member sites. It is unlikely to be as accurate as telemetry gathered by Microsoft itself, but still shows a clear trend. Users are not adopting Windows 11 as quickly as Microsoft would like.

There are signs that enterprises are moving to Windows 11, although the wave of upgrades is not the tsunami that Microsoft or its hardware partners were hoping for. Despite the technology hype, AI PCs are yet to have much impact in the marketplace.

With 10 months to go before support ends for Windows 10, and with the world quite different from how it was when Windows 11 first debuted in 2021, Microsoft is running out of time to rethink its strategy. This could be either in terms of extending support for Windows 10 or tweaking the requirements of Windows 11.

In December 2024, the company showed no signs of backing down on the latter. ®