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Windows 10 adoption rate is stagnating

It seems that Microsoft is having a hard time retrieving more new users on Windows 10. The operating system install base has been stuck on 400 million for four months now. Ever since Microsoft ended its free upgrade campaign, that install base remained roughly the same. The company earlier this week announced that it has 400 million active Windows 10 users reports myce.com:

The slow growth is related to the the end of the free Windows 10 upgrade period and the disappointing sales of Windows smartphones. It’s therefore very unlikely that Microsoft will achieve its goal of 1 billion Windows 10 users by 2018.

“We’re very happy with the progress but due to the shifted focus of our smartphone hardware business it will take us longer to achieve the goal of 1 billion active devices by 2018”, according to a Microsoft spokesman.

Windows 10’s market share has grown by 2% to 3% after the free upgrade period ended, about a fifth of the 10% monthly growth when users could still upgrade for free.

> The slow growth is related to the the end of the free Windows 10 upgrade period and the disappointing sales of Windows smartphones. It’s therefore very unlikely that Microsoft will achieve its goal of 1 billion Windows 10 users by 2018.

Win10 adoption is in trouble, and they know it. They'll be lucky to make a billion installs by 2020 at this rate.

But in Jan 2020 Win7 stops getting security updates. That will force a lot of business and professional users to switch to Win10 if they haven't already.

Hopefully, by then Win10 will have evolved into a useful environment to get actual work done, as opposed to watching streaming media and checking one's Facebook and Twitter feeds.