Windows 7: a year after its death, its users still exist

In a heartfelt nod to Monty Python, Windows 7 reminds you that it is not dead yet .

One year after Microsoft officially ended support for its system operating , a small but determined population of PC users would rather fight rather than change. How many of them? No one knows for sure, but their numbers have dropped dramatically over the past year.

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On the eve of Microsoft 's Windows 7 end of support deadline, I consulted analysis experts and found that the owners of 'environ 200 million PCs around the world would ignore this deadline and continue to use their preferred operating system. This was, it is true, a rough estimate. (If you want to do the math yourself, read my post from last year, "It 's 2020: How many PCs are still running Windows 7? " )

During the lull of the holidays at the end of 2020, I decided to come back to the subject and publish the latest update of these figures.

Let's start with the United States Government Digital Analytics Program, which shows the total number of visitors to US websites over the past 90 days. One of the datasets includes an analysis of visits from all Windows PCs in their different versions, which makes it an ideal tool for this question.

At the end of December 2019, 75.8% of these PCs were running Windows 10, 18.9% were still running Windows 7, and only 4.6% were running Windows 8.x.

A year later, as December 2020 draws to a close, the proportion of PCs equipped with Windows 10 has increased by 12%, reaching 87.8%; the number of Windows 7 fell more than 10 points, to 8.5%, and the population of Windows 8.x users declined further, to 3.4%. (The former champion of PC operating systems, Windows XP, is now almost invisible, with its device count only a fraction of the total).

If my calculations from a year ago were correct, that means over 100 million Windows PCs have been retired, recycled, or upgraded in the past 12 months.

Other analyzes tell an almost identical story.

At NetMarketShare, for example, the numbers at the end of 2020 show that the useon Windows 10 increased 11 points from 63.0% to 74.0%, while Windows 9 usage fell 9.5 points from 31.2% to 21.7% .

Similarly, StatCounter Global Stats has shown that the number of PCs running Windows 10 increased by more than 12%, from 64.7% to 76.0%, while the population of PCs running Windows 7 fell almost 10 points to 17.7%.

The transformation of these percentages into whole numbers is unfortunately not a simple matter of

Some of these users pay Microsoft for the privilege of receiving security updates, although it is not clear how many of them are part of the Extended Security Update program . And these customers will be under more pressure to get an update in 2021, as the cost of this program is expected to double.

Source: "HFrance.com "