Microsoft's aggressive campaign to upgrade older PCs to Windows 10 appears to be working.
That's the inescapable conclusion from the latest data from two commercial web analytics services and the U.S. Government's open analytics program.
For this story, I've gathered the latest data, covering the months of March through May 2016, from Net Applications (aka
Net Market Share),
StatCounter Global Stats, and the United States Government's
Digital Analytics Program (DAP). For the first two, I removed non-Windows operating systems from the data set and then normalized the results so that all the comparisons show the share for each version of Windows based on a population of all Windows PCs.
Rather than rely on the oversimplified bar and pie charts that Net Market Share and StatCounter publish each month, I downloaded the raw data from all three sources and analyzed it carefully.
Remarkably, all three sources are in general agreement. Among the population of Windows-based desktop PCs, laptops, and tablets, Windows 10 usage has doubled in the past six months, with all other versions down noticeably.
