Wednesday, May 6th 2020
Windows 10 Market Share Drops Between March and April
Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system has historically been rising in market share thanks to the slow depreciation of Windows 7 OS, and Microsoft's efforts to push it as only Windows OS available for desktop users. However, according to the information by NetMarketShare, a company providing statistics about the market share of Internet Technologies (browsers and OSes), Windows 10 has seen a decrease in market share. This news is a surprising discovery, given that the OS is expected to be gaining new market share slowly, given that Windows 7 has reached the end of life in January.
From 57.37% of market share in February, Windows 10 got down to 57.34% in March and 56.08% in April. While this may seem just like a few percentage decrease, given the massive amount of PCs available, it can be counted in thousands. What could be the reason behind this is the current COVID-19 related pandemic and slower demand for office PCs, as everyone is working from home now. This was a big growth sector for Windows 10 as the previous version of Windows, the 7, was very popular in office space before its EoL. Of course, this is just a speculation which you should take with a big grain of salt. Some of the interesting things to point out is that Ubuntu, a Linux kernel based operating system, has massively increased its market share from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April.
Sources:
NetMarketShare, Forbes
From 57.37% of market share in February, Windows 10 got down to 57.34% in March and 56.08% in April. While this may seem just like a few percentage decrease, given the massive amount of PCs available, it can be counted in thousands. What could be the reason behind this is the current COVID-19 related pandemic and slower demand for office PCs, as everyone is working from home now. This was a big growth sector for Windows 10 as the previous version of Windows, the 7, was very popular in office space before its EoL. Of course, this is just a speculation which you should take with a big grain of salt. Some of the interesting things to point out is that Ubuntu, a Linux kernel based operating system, has massively increased its market share from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April.
53 Comments on Windows 10 Market Share Drops Between March and April
For example:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:77.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/77.0
I understand that people here don't need to be coddled like that but if you look at the average computer user, they need all the hand-holding that they can get and a hell of a lot more.
privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement
privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/
privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/data-collection-windows
Enjoy.
On the other hand. MS is one of the very few tech companies I have a high, if not higher than my own government, trust factor with. Why? Because we (myself/customers of MS) share some underlying principles. MS's business is immediately killed if they breach the trust they have built up with data leaks and actual spying. Over all these years though, and despite all the telemetry deployed and attempts to take it further, in the end, absolutely nothing has gone very wrong. Meanwhile, there are privacy discussions that are very visible and real to us regarding almost every other big tech company, like Facebook, Google, etc etc. Even Apple had its problems, with Maps holding location data on you (within the OS, but easy to extract), Siri listening in on you 'for analysis', and some other cloud related nonsense.
Seems to me MS is doing a lot of things right. Another big, big plus with MS is their dominance, which also reinforces trust. After all, they have no incentive to do weird or risky stuff to us and every incentive to hold on to what they have.
At the same time I feel it is always good to remain a critic of anything they do that doesn't suit me. Since Nadella, though, that feedback seems to be acted on much more swiftly, too. Another complaint about MS of the past that's been handled in a way I kinda like. They've made some strategic adjustments, also with Windows 10, that have been favorable and based on our feedback.
Anyways, Win10 has been wiresharked and it's a lot more than it seems at first glance, really.
www.softscheck.com/en/privacy-analysis-windows-10-enterprise-telemetry-level-0/
EDIT: linked wrong article initially.
Cortana and Bing are easily enough avoidable and I wish they went further into telemetry data.
It's not so much a problem as poor wording.
As for going further into telemetry data, there is a way you can do that manually now, if you trust MS's tools, but I've not messed with it too much yet.
Honestly, my experience with Cortana and cloud search is minimal as Cortana is location-specific and not available in my location. Also, I do not use Microsoft account, have most of the privacy settings set to more private choices. Since I am using Windows 10 Pro, Basic Diagnostic Data is enabled and seems to be the only inherent telemetry/data being sent. I am struggling to find the articles right now but Microsoft's own description about what is sent (using their tools as you noted) seems to be accurate enough and not that concerning.
Google is even worse than Microsoft in terms of the kind of data and how much they collect on you, but I never ever see the kind of hate or the level of vitriol against Google that Microsoft receives. Double standard much? Even if you do use Linux you can't avoid Google, Google is everywhere! Google has analytics, they're the edge host of many such Javascript libraries like jQuery (which is used damn near everywhere!), they do email, and they run YouTube. It's damn near impossible to hide from Google on the Internet and all of the data collection that Google does yet again... Microsoft gets all the hate.
Oh, I forgot... Google good, Microsoft bad. I must have missed last week's propaganda meeting where they talked about that. I'll be there next week; I promise to be brainwashed into loving Google. I'll be a Google loving zombie by the end of next week. :rolleyes:
"Showing 1 to 10 of 61 entries" ... so in that view, there are 51 other entries below 0.63%
Windows 10 52.68%
Windows 7 29.34%
Mac OS X 10.14 4.10%
Windows 8.1 3.74%
Mac OS X 10.15 1.97%
Mac OS X 10.13 1.60%
Windows XP 1.60%
Linux 1.27%
Mac OS X 10.12 0.71%
Windows 8 0.63%
Showing 1 to 10 of 61 entries
Windows 10 59.77%
Windows 7 33.29%
Windows 8.1 4.24%
Windows XP 1.82%
Windows 8 0.71%
Windows Vista 0.16%
Windows NT 0.00%
Windows 2000 0.00%
Windows 98 0.00%
Windows 95 0.00%
Showing 1 to 10 of 10 entries
Cortana, Edge, Internet Explorer, Telemetry and if you want to use your own security programs/suite, Windows Defender can all be removed(deleted) not just disabled.
But go ahead, disable that stuff. If you have problems, don't come crying to me and you better not bitch about how shit went wrong because you have nobody but yourself to blame.
MICROSOFT NEEDS TO KNOW!!!