Windows by the numbers: Windows 7 falls further behind XP's march-to-retirement pace
Windows 7 again retained its majority user share in August, setting the stage for a potentially chaotic migration to its successor, Windows 10, over the next 28 months.
According to analytics vendor Net Applications, Windows 7's user share in August was 48.4%, a decline of half a percentage point. The veteran operating system, which powers the bulk of enterprise personal computers, ran 53.4% of all Windows machines in the same period. (The second number is larger because Windows was detected on 90.7% of the world's PCs, not 100%; the remainder ran macOS or one of the many flavors of Linux.)
The problem is that even with a small downturn last month, Windows 7's share has barely budged since April 2016. In the intervening 16 months, the operating system has gained six-tenths of a percentage point. During the same span of time, other editions have dumped significant user share: Windows 8 and 8.1, for example, unloaded more than 10 points in the same stretch, while the ancient Windows XP dropped 4.6 percentage points.
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