Credit: Microsoft
With a sincere nod to Monty Python, Windows 7 would like you all to know that he hasn’t died yet.
A year after Microsoft officially ended support for its long-running operating system, a small but determined population of PC users prefers to fight rather than switch. How many? No one knows for sure, but that number has dropped substantially in the past year.
On the eve of Microsoft’s Windows 7 end of support milestone, I consulted some analytics experts and estimated that owners of nearly 200 million PCs worldwide would ignore this deadline and continue running their preferred operating system. This was undoubtedly a rough estimate. (If you want to do the math yourself, read my post from last year, “It’s 2020: How many PCs are still running Windows 7?”)
During the holiday lull in late 2020, I decided to go back and run the latest version of these analytical reports. They tell a consistent story.
Let’s start with the United States Government’s Digital Analytics Program, which reports a running, unfiltered total of US website visitors in the past 90 days. One of the data sets includes a visit report for all PCs running any version of Windows, which makes it an ideal proxy for this issue.
At the end of December 2019, 75.8% of these PCs were running Windows 10, 18.9% were still running Windows 7 and only 4.6% were still on the unloved Windows 8.x.
A year later, with the end of December 2020, the proportion of Windows 10 PCs increased 12%, to 87.8%; the Windows 7 count dropped more than 10 points, to 8.5%, and the Windows 8.x remnant population decreased further, to minuscule 3.4%. (The former champion of PC operating systems, Windows XP, is now almost invisible, with his device count adding up to a fraction of a rounding error.)
If my calculations a year ago were correct, it means that more than 100 million Windows PCs have been retired, recycled or upgraded in the past 12 months.
Other metrics tell an almost identical story.
On NetMarketShare, for example, the figures at the end of 2020 show that Windows 10 usage increased 11 points, from 63.0% to 74.0%, while Windows 7 usage dropped 9.5 points, from 31.2 % to 21.7%.
Likewise, StatCounter Global Stats showed that the number of PCs running Windows 10 increased by more than 12 percent, from 64.7% to 76.0%, while the population of Windows 7 PCs dropped by almost 10 points to 17, 7%.
Turning these percentages into whole numbers is not a matter of simple division, unfortunately, because we don’t know the denominator. Microsoft told us years ago that the Windows user base is 1.5 billion, but I argued a year ago that the number of Windows PCs is probably much less than that, even with the resurgence of PC sales induced by a pandemic. Even taking into account this uncertainty, it is clear that at least 100 million PCs are still running Windows 7 and that number could be significantly higher.
Some of these resisters are paying Microsoft for the privilege of receiving security updates, although it is unclear how many are part of the Extended Security Update program. And these customers will face more pressure to upgrade in 2021, as the cost of these upgrades is expected to double.