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, ...