The adoption rate of PCs pre-installed with Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system has increased significantly at the beginning of the fourth quarter.
The first two and a half weeks of October 2015, Month 3 after the launch of the new OS, saw a total of 187,000 new Windows 10-based PCs go through Western European distributors, a number that translated into a 34.5% share of the Windows Home and a 14.7% share of the Windows Business segment (including the Windows 7/Windows 10 downgrade version).
Vendors driving the transition to Windows 10 Home in the channel during early October were HP, Acer, Lenovo, ASUS and Toshiba. The majority of new Windows 10 Home PCs sold were notebooks (92%), with detachable or convertible systems accounting for 13% of these. Meanwhile, HP, Fujitsu and Lenovo were driving the transition to Windows 10 Pro. New systems included desktops, notebooks and workstations, with the majority based on the Windows 7/Windows 10 Pro downgrade version of the new operating system.
Despite this significant rise at the start of Q4 2015, the adoption rate continues to be lower than that of most previous versions of Windows, particularly in the Home segment. In 2007, Vista was pre-installed on 67% of new Windows Home PC devices sold by distributors in the first few weeks of Month 3 after launch, while Windows 7 made it to a 76% consumer share in the same period following its 2009 launch and Windows 8 to 83% in 2012. Adoption of the business version of all of Windows 10’s predecessors was slower than that of the Home version but, even so, Windows 7 was preloaded on 63% of Windows business PCs in the first few weeks of Month 3 after its launch. There are a number of reasons for this: Windows 10 was the first operating system to be made available as a free upgrade to many consumer users; the availability of new products was delayed by a late release of t he build; and the transition process has been considerably hampered by high amounts of old PC stock.
by MCP
InCONTEXT 