Yesterday, NetMarketShare's report revealed that Windows 7's market share is increasing and is now up to 48.41%. On the other hand, Windows 10's market share was reported at 25.19% - a decline of 0.11 percentage points compared to last month, which is within the margin of error. Now, Steam's latest hardware report indicates a similar trend as well.
According to the Steam hardware report of February 2017, Windows 10 is now being used by 48.77% of all users. This figure comprises of 47.71% of users who utilize the 64-bit version and 1.06% that use the 32-bit version. Overall, this is still a decline of 0.9 percentage points as compared to last month. It is also worth noting that the operating system's user base was over 50% in January, which makes the decline all the more significant.
Meanwhile, Windows 7 seems to have benefited from this decline and now accounts for 36.81% of all users. On the other hand, all other iterations of Windows faced a decrease in user base including XP, 8, 8.1, and Vista. That said, the overall user base of the operating system still increased to 95.96%, thanks to Windows 7.
Apple's OS X user base faced a small decline of 0.14 percentage points and now stands at 3.14%. Version 10.12.3 was the only iteration of the operating system which increased in terms of user base.
On the other hand, Linux remained relatively stagnant at 0.75%.
On the hardware end, things remained more or less the same as they have been for the past several months. 8GB of RAM maintained its position as the most common memory configuration by Steam gamers. Meanwhile, the most popular display resolution for primary displays and multi-monitor setups was 1920x1080 and 3840x1080 respectively.
The reports from Steam and NetMarketShare may be some cause for concern for Microsoft. The increased adoption of Windows 7 as compared to Windows 10 - a trend that has now stretched over two months - will certainly be a worrying aspect for the company should it develop into a longer term trend. That said, it is worth noting that Steam's report is based on user surveys so it may not accurately depict the real situation, but supporting data from NetMarketShare certainly raises some interesting questions.
Source: Steam
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