Windows 11 Usage Share is Struggling. Thanks, Microsoft! (Premium)

Data from the market researchers at StatCounter show that Windows 11’s meager usage growth hasn’t come at the expense of Windows 10. Instead, it’s taking share from Windows 7 and other versions. This is a far different picture than the one painted by Microsoft, leading to renewed questions about why the software giant has artificially restricted access to an OS update that is, by all accounts, a rather minor upgrade.

Windows 11 is now installed on about 15.45 percent of all Windows PCs, StatCounter says, up from 8.91 percent in April, a gain of about 6.5 percentage points. That seems reasonable, even successful, in isolation. But there is so much more data to discuss.

First and perhaps most importantly, Windows 10 usage has remained pretty consistent in that same six-month period: it was 73.1 percent six months ago and is 71.26 today. More to the point, Windows 10 has had 71.x percent usage for four of the past five months, so it’s been incredibly consistent. Meaning that Windows 11’s growth has come from somewhere else: most of the PCs that could be upgraded to Windows 11—or were replaced by new Windows 11 PCs—happened in the first six months of its availability.

Windows 7, meanwhile, has fallen almost exactly 3 percentage points in the past six months—from 12.67 to 9.62 percent—accounting for about half of Windows 11’s growth. Usage in Windows 8.1 and XP has fallen by largely imperceptible amounts in that timeframe, amounting to roughly 1 percentage point. And so we can assume that roughly 2 percentage points of growth came from new PC sales.

Here’s what bothers me about this.

If you think back to Windows 10, Terry Myerson declared that he wanted all Windows users on the same version, the rationale being that the entire community would be safer because Microsoft could target a single release with security patches, which would speed time to market. And the company pulled out all the stops to make that happen. In fact, it behaved unethically by forcing Windows 10 upgrades on unwilling users and even, in some cases, silently upgrading them overnight without their approval.

The result was disastrous, in no small part because the original “one version” vision was bogus: instead, Microsoft released a new version of Windows every six months, overpopulating the world with new versions and creating a situation in which there were more discrete different versions of Windows than at any time in history. And many of those version upgrades, all essentially rushed to market, arrived with serious bugs and other issues. It wasn’t until late in Windows 10’s life cycle that things finally calmed down, and a lot of that had to do with Microsoft basically giving up on new features and releasing stale, uneventful upgrades.

And then there’s Windows 11.

The dream of “one version of Windows” is apparently dead, I’m sure because of how badly it flopped when Microsoft actually tried. And so this time, it over-corrected in the opposite direction. Not by not trying. But rather by trying to not upgrade as many existing PCs as possible.

Sure, Windows 11 is still a free upgrade. But now you have to qualify to get it thanks to an onerous set of arbitrary new hardware requirements that purport to have one goal—better security—but really serve another aim: artificially goosing new PC sales at a faster than usual clip.

At the time Microsoft made this decision, the raw, calculated nature of it actually made sense: we were still in the heart of a pandemic, PC sales were up artificially and temporarily, and the firm no doubt felt that a potentially exciting new release of Windows could keep the party going, making everyone involved—Microsoft and the PC makers—happy. But there’s always a fly in the ointment, isn’t there? And in this case, there were two: despite being rushed to market, Windows 11 didn’t arrive until the pandemic-era buying spree was over, and then 2022 happened with its economic collapse. Suddenly, no one is buying new PCs anymore.

Today, Microsoft’s decision to arbitrarily prevent most Windows 10 users from upgrading to Windows 11 seems less intelligent. Still devious, yes, but dumb. There is a user base of hundreds of millions of PCs out there that could successfully upgrade to Windows 11, but they can’t because of Microsoft’s artificial blocks. And none of those people are in any position to buy a new PC now. And so Windows 10 lingers on, with that 2025 expiration date suddenly seeming like more and more of a problem.

I suspect that Microsoft will simply ride out the current economic environment and see what happens. But as 2025 gets closer, one wonders whether the firm will decide to suddenly open up Windows 11 to more users, perhaps those with 6th- and 7th-Gen Intel processors and TPM 1.2 chipsets (which must be the largest slice of the market today).

Whatever happens, Windows 11’s low-boil usage share does at least prove that Microsoft miscalculated. It thought that a combination of pandemic-era buying and unreasonably strict upgrading rules would provide a surge of new PC sales. But what really happened is that PC sales settled back into their normal, drawn-out rhythm. People will upgrade their PC—to a new PC or not—when the current one dies, thank you very much. And not when Microsoft says boo.

The world would be a different place today if those hundreds of millions of users had been prompted about getting this exciting new release of Windows (according to Microsoft marketing). Instead, most of them have probably not even heard of Windows 11, nor do they understand what a minor technical feat it would be to upgrade to it. That’s a missed opportunity for Microsoft and, really, for those users too. Who by no fault of their own ended up on the wrong side of an arbitrary line in the sand. There’s nothing quite like a self-inflicted wound.