It has been a little bit less than three weeks since Microsoft released Windows 10 for consumers around the world. The OS, which is receiving positive reviews from across the web, is being adopted quickly despite there being a few teething issues upfront.
According to our sources, Windows 10 has surpassed 53 million installs, which StatCounter says now accounts for 4.95% of the market as of last week. At it's peak, Windows 10 was being installed on about 1500 machines per second.
According to NetMarketshare, Windows 8.1 had 13.09% of the market at the end of July, and OS X 10.10 had 4.74%, which means Windows 10 has likely surpassed the install base of Apple's most recent OS. But comparing StatCounter to NetMarketshare is not always a perfect comparison, as they have different means for collecting the data; and seeing how close the numbers are, the two OSes are likely very similar in marketshare, but it's not definitively possible to say (yet) that Windows 10 has surpassed that of OS X Yosemite.
We will be curious to see when Microsoft publicly announces the next milestone, its first and only announcement was 14 million installs, but it's worth pointing out that you can't compare the Windows 10 adoption rate to that of Windows 7 or 8, as those products were a premium offering, whereas Windows 10 is free for most of the early adopters.
Microsoft’s tactic of giving away the OS as a free upgrade to consumers with Windows 7 or 8.1 appears to be paying off. Based on the distribution of the OS to date, it looks like accepted the offer and pre-registered to receive the OS, which is a big win, as the company needs the OS to succeed, to help drive developers to build apps for its store.
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