Despite Microsoft’s push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant’s latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.
This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.
I’m on Windows 7. When I saw Windows 8, I said “Guess I’ll wait until windows 9”.
When I saw Windows 10, I said “Guess I’ll wait for Windows 11.”
When I saw Windows 11, I said “Guess I’ll wait until Windows 12.”
Now I’m saying…seriously, did NO ONE else notice they skipped Windows 9??? It went 7-8-10-11.
because calling it Windows 9 would have messed up software that checked if it was running on Windows 95.
Skipping 9 was due to a combination of marketting (“It’s nothing like 8 was, we swear! It’s not even 9, it’s 10!”) and ye olde third party software developers making the poor decision to query the OS name instead of the OS version to set some compatibility stuff.
They skipped to 10 because it was going to be the last version of Windows and just be updated from there. Then they scrapped that and released 11.
IIRC that was just a poorly worded statement from a rather unimportant ms employee who really wanted to say “it’s the latest version of Windows”.
I always just assumed 7 ate 9… I’ll see myself out.
I wonder if 8.1 was intended to be 9 and was never released as such
Oh yeah. The number 9 is superstitious in some East Asian cultures, like the Chinese. Its pronunciation is similar to “unlucky” or “suffering” so people try not to use it, like some buildings skip the 13th floor. But it’s not unique. In Japan, the numbers 4 and 7 sound like death so they use alternative pronunciations. Another popular Asian belief similar to Astrology divinates personalities based on blood types.
Since Windows is a global product, MS execs decided to skip the number due to cultural sensitivity. They also wanted to close the gap with the Mac versioning and present it as a big improvement over Win 8, so it was probably a strategic decision for various reasons.