Windows 7 Market Share Shrinks After Ending Support

The official support period for Windows 7 ended in January 2020. However, this has not changed much in terms of the number of users of this version. This is due to the effort that companies would have to take on when switching.

That comes from the latest figures on the market distribution of operating systems. The number of users of Windows 7 has not decreased significantly in the last eleven months. This suggests that very few users took advantage of Microsoft’s free upgrade offer to Windows 10. Microsoft had already offered free upgrades with the start of Windows 10 over five years ago, but the company was not really successful with them.

In many places, however, this is simply due to the fact that companies thought about switching late, shy away from costs, and have problems with alternative offers that they would have to use instead of their old solutions after their switch. Windows 7 was released in 2009. The regular “mainstream support” for the operating system ended in 2015. At the same time, Windows 10 was released and offered users of older versions a free upgrade.

Support only for money

But even after 2015, a large team at Microsoft was still busy providing security patches for Windows 7. On January 14, 2020, Microsoft stopped distributing these security patches and provided technical support for Windows 7.Users were again offered the option to update to Windows 10, but millions have not yet done so, the online magazine reports Windows Latest.

According to the latest figures from NetMarketShare and StatCounter, Windows 7 is still active on at least 17 percent of Windows PCs. That’s an almost terrifying number if you ask security experts. The latest figures from StatCounter suggest at least once that Windows 7 runs on 17.6 percent of devices, which is about 8 percent less than the market share of 25.56 percent it had in January 2020. The projection by NetMarketShare also assumes a similar decline. It is pertinent to mention here that Windows 7 is still the second most popular desktop operating system in the world at the start of 2021.