Report: Windows 10 Adoption in Businesses Double That of Windows 8

A report from the industry analysts at Spiceworks claims that Windows 10 adoption in businesses is proceeding at a pace that is double that of Windows 8 from three years ago. I’m most curious why the adoption rate is even faster, however, given how reviled Windows 8 was, especially with businesses.

“Spiceworks’ Windows 10 report shows the current Windows 10 penetration rate in the business environment stands at 18 percent after 6 months of availability,” a representative of the firm told me. “And the software industry is way ahead of the curve with a penetration rate of 28 percent.”

Looking at the report, a few things stand out.

22 million business PCs are now running Windows 10. That data comes from Microsoft, which had also announced that 200 million devices, overall, are running Windows 10. Since Windows 10 is in fact in use on about 178 million Windows 10 PCs (as opposed to other device types), that is strong adoption: About 12 percent of all Windows 10 PCs in the world are in businesses right now.

40 percent of businesses will adopt Windows 10 within one year. In a previous report, Spiceworks predicted that Windows 10 adoption within businesses would hit 40 percent within one year.

18 percent of businesses have deployed Windows 10. Six months into its first year, Windows 10 has been deployed to about 18 million businesses. Note that this figure doesn’t (and shouldn’t) mesh with the 12 percent figure above because no business would swap out all of its PCs and/or existing Windows installs for Windows 10. (For example, Spiceworks notes that approximately 40 percent of the businesses that have adopted Windows 10 “have three or more Windows 10 devices.”)

Windows 10 adoption rate is about double that of Windows 8. OK, it’s a low bar. But 9.3 percent of businesses had adopted Windows 8 within 6 months, compared to 18 percent for Windows 10. I think the delta is bigger, and can be explained by the fact that many businesses actually rolled back Windows 8 deployments and gave up on the OS.

Windows 10 is much more successful than Windows 7 or Windows 8. As Spiceworks notes, it took approximately 1 year for Windows 7 and more than 15 months for Windows 8 to pass the 200 million device usage mark. Microsoft hit this mark with Windows 10 in just 6 months.

Some other interesting facts. As you might expect, Windows 10 adoption varies by region, company size, and industry. For example, the software industry is well ahead of industries like manufacturing, energy, construction, government, and others when it comes to adopting Windows 10.

Key takeaway. According to Spiceworks, the key takeaway here is that “Windows 10 is living up to the lofty pre-launch adoption predictions IT pros made last year. Microsoft is also still on track to have a billion devices running Windows 10 within a few years of launch—they’re already 20% of the way there according to their own data, and 11% of those 200 million devices are being used by businesses.”